Comment 35 for bug 1715552

These instructions worked as well for me with VMWare Player 12.5.9 after upgrading to Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS Desktop with Linux kernel 4.15, thanks!

However, I'm now prepping for further upgrade to the latest Ubuntu 21.04 (kernel 5.11), and there seems to be more problems! The distro's shared libraries are now further updated, so after manually building the vmmon.ko and vmnet.ko for the new kernel using the vmware-host-modules project, starting the VMware services successfully, and adding the soft link on libz.so.1, when I try to launch vmplayer I get the following output and then a segmentation fault:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ vmplayer
Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "atk-bridge": /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libatspi.so.0: undefined symbol: g_type_add_instance_private

(vmware-modconfig:53428): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: "adwaita",
/usr/share/themes/Yaru/gtk-2.0/main.rc:775: error: unexpected identifier `direction', expected character `}'

(vmware-modconfig:53428): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: "adwaita",
/usr/share/themes/Yaru/gtk-2.0/hacks.rc:28: error: invalid string constant "normal_entry", expected valid string constant
Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module": libcanberra-gtk-module.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
/usr/bin/vmplayer: line 106: 53428 Segmentation fault (core dumped) "$BINDIR"/vmware-modconfig --appname="VMware Player" --icon="vmware-player"
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$

I suspect there's another shared libraries that now needs to be redirected to the distro, but I'm really not clear how to figure out the dependency tree, as VMware uses this 'appLoader' application to launch it's actual binaries and masks the environment and what it is actually doing.

Unfortunately, as others have mentioned, upgrading VMware to 14 or later is not an option for me, as my CPU is from before 2011 without Intel EPT / AMD NPT, and 12.5.9 happens to be the last version that works on these. So this problem is going to keep cropping up for some people for a very long time! Any help resolving the dependencies between VMware's references and/or shipped libraries and Ubuntu's latest would be greatly appreciated!