Upgrading to VMware Player 2.0
These days I’ve been doing some upgrading/tuning tasks in my workstation that I had previously postponed because of exams and other projects. One of them being the upgrade of vmware player, which felt more responsive and finally features usb 2.0 support. I really like this virtualization software and the freely available player version joint to the ability of QEMU for creating vmware images allows me to test new OS versions, multiplatform software, etc. Since I cannot afford the workstation version.
The installation was really straightforward, I downloaded the 64-bit version from its website and executed the vmware-install.pl script. It overwrote my previous version and asked only for installation directories, which by default matched the ones of my previous install in /opt. The difficult part in vmware installations usually comes now with the vmware-config.pl script, specially when it comes to the compilation of the kernel modules, but this time everything worked fine! Default options were right, it detected my kernel source libraries and compiled against them.
The previous time I had to install vmware-player there was no way of doing it without patching both configurator and kernel, I’m sure some of you have heard about the vmware-any-any patches 
So everything felt quite good, I just ran vmware as always, accept the license agreement and…
saburo virtual # /opt/vmware/player/bin/vmplayer
/opt/vmware/player/lib/vmware/bin/vmplayer: symbol lookup error: /opt/vmware/player/lib/vmware/lib/libvmwareui.so.0/libvmwareui.so.0: undefined symbol: _ZN3Gtk13RecentManager11get_defaultEv
Symbol lookup error… cool, time to google a bit. Lucky me, having waited for some time to upgrade let time for others to go around this problem and there are already fixes posted in vmware forums. It’s got something to do with GTK libraries for the user interface and the fix is as easy as adding the following line before the exec command in the /opt/vmware/bin/vmware script:
export VMWARE_USE_SHIPPED_GTK=yes
And that’s all…