VMWare Unity Mode with Ubuntu 12.10

Question

This is a very difficult thing to search for, and find an answer to because of the unfortunate choice VMWare and Ubuntu both having something called "Unity". My host operating system is Windows 7 - 64 bit, running VMWare Workstation 9.0.1. I have a virtual machine running Ubuntu 12.10 - 64 bit. When I attempt to put VMWare in "Unity mode", I get the following message:

The virtual machine cannot enter Unity mode because:
- Unity is not supported on the guest operating system.

From the VMWare site, there is nothing listed that says that Ubuntu is not supported for this... and I have installed the latest vmware-tools on the guest operating system. It seems like a lot of people have had this issue, but I haven't seen a good resolution to it yet. Does anyone know how to get Unity mode working with Ubuntu?

Answer 1

I had the same problem. I thought it is just Ubuntu 12.10, so I setup 12.04 in Vmware Workstation 9 and had the same result. You're right, it's hard to find the solution for this. The problem is Unity Desktop (in Ubuntu), so I switched to gnome3.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install gnome-shell

Log out and click the circle to change between desktop environment

Resources: http://communities.vmware.com/message/2139647

http://ubuntuxtreme.com/howto/how-to-change-desktop-environment-in-ubuntu-12-10/