Using Ubuntu 11.10 and Vmware Player 4.0.
Every time when I open the vmware player, the last library was not there (it was just blank). I can manually add it and it is working then.
Anyone experienced this?
The real source of the problem: VMware Player stores its Library of the used machines in ~/.recently-used.xbel
. But GTK3 changed the location of this file to ~/.local/share/
. And ~/.recently-used.xbel
is cleared on the regular basis, so the list of machines becomes empty. (Some insight can be found here: http://communities.vmware.com/message/1714765 and here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gtk+3.0/+bug/1007336).
As we cannot change the behavior of VMware, we can use the workaround. Use the wrapper script to run VMware Player:
#!/bin/bash
cp ~/.vmware/.recently-used.xbel ~
/usr/bin/vmplayer
sleep 5
mv ~/.recently-used.xbel ~/.vmware/
Save it somewhere in your home folder, make it executable and change the launcher which starts your VMware Player to run this script instead. It will store the list of your machines till the next launch of VMware. It was tested with Ubuntu 12.04.1 and VMware Player 5.0.0.
BTW: The answer which got the bounty is wrong. Running VMware Player with superuser privilege won't help you to save the Library. Moreover, it's definitely bad advice to use sudo
in this case.
~/.recently-used.xbel
is cleared from the home folder. I have a suspicion that this link won't last long.
It looks like vmware player has no permissions to write to the file (or directory) where it tries to save the library.
This can happen if, e.g. you use sudo
to run it once -- it'll then create files as root inside your home directory.
The fix would be to find all the files that belong to root in your home -- in a terminal do
sudo find $HOME -uid 0 -exec chown $USER:$USER {} +
In the future never use sudo
with graphical application to prevent this kind of issue -- use gksudo
instead.
find: `/home/tombrito/.gvfs': Permission denied
, I'll check if it worked anyway after I restart the computer, and I came back here to tell (sorry, I lost the bounty time, I was out a few days).
Feb 23, 2012 at 19:36
I have encountered the same problem on ubuntu 11.10. Try to run the vmplayer with root privilege, typing sudo vmplayer
in the terminal. And the virtual machine you have run won't be missing.
However, I have no idea about how to solve this problem with the normal user's privilege.
In order to save your vmplayer library across reboots, do following:
.bundle
executable from vmware websitesudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-'uname -r'
.bundle
gksudo bash ./VMware-Player-*.bundle
Run these commands:
rm ~/.recently-used.xbel
ln ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel ~/.recently-used.xbel
This will fix the problem. The reason as to why this is required can be found in whtyger's answer.
The fix will not persist over reboots, so you'll need to have this script automatically run each time your computer starts.
Another option is that your preferences file in $HOME/.vmware
is corrupted or can't be read from the current vmplayer
installation. Delete it and run vmplayer
again so it can create it again. Add you VMs into the library and check again.