Arch Linux User Repository

After the first installation, please:

1) install the appropriate headers package(s) for your installed kernel(s): linux-headers for default kernel, linux-lts-headers for LTS kernel...

2) reboot or load vmw_vmci and vmmon kernel modules (modprobe -a vmw_vmci vmmon)

3) Enable the services you need (using .service units to activate them during boot or .path units to activate them when a VM is started) :

• vmware-networks: to have network access inside VMs

• vmware-usbarbitrator: to connect USB devices inside VMs

MisterPresident: I never had this issue. Does your user have sudo rights? If no, be sure to enter the root credentials when the popup ask your password. You can also try to enter the license key from a terminal with root rights: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/VMware#Entering_the_Workstation_Pro_license_key

After entering my license key / or trying the trail version I get this message: Failed to register license. This may be because the root password is required to register your license. Please contact a system administrator with any questions. Any ideas?

Sounds great, thank you!

gbr: I've made some tests and I can confirm that gcr is responsible of the problem. I will add it in the dependencies in a future package update.

jihem: Thanks a lot for the tips. You're not going to believe this. I had already given up about getting the proper theme in VMware. So, a few minutes ago (literally) I had to use VMware, and I realized that both GTK/Icon themes were picked up correctly. Hilarious. So I had to find out how in the world I was able to fix this. The only thing I did in the past few hours was installing some packages, so it had to be it. I uninstalled about 8 packages and opened up VMware to see if some of them would break theming again. It actually did, so I skipped the ones which had nothing to do with GTK or GNOME and I was left with: gvfs. I found it weird that VMware needed gvfs to detect my default GTK/icon theme, however, when I installed gvfs, it pulled some other package too, called 'gcr'. So I uninstalled gvfs and just left gcr installed. To my surprise it worked...

But tomorrow I'll set up a virtual machine in a clean non-GNOME ambient, then install both vmware-workstation and gcr to see how it goes.

gbr: A (long) explanation of this behaviour: VMware installation includes all the libraries it needs to work. When you start the program, it firstly try to load the libraries installed by your distribution, but if it fails for some reason, it loads its own libraries instead (for information, setting VMWARE_USE_SHIPPED_LIBS=1 force VMware to use its own libraries). The problem is: VMware includes a very old version of GTK3 (version 3.14) and it seems that this version doesn't load the GTK theme defined by the user.

So, if you are lucky, VMware can load the Arch version of GTK and it displays your theme properly, but if it can't, it will display the default GTK 3.14 theme. This behaviour can change simply by upgrading the system, installing or removing some packages.

On VMware 14, I was never able to use the system GTK library, so I added a hack in the package to force VMware to use the user theme by setting the GTK_THEME environment variable. But it doesn't always work well, depending if your theme is compatible with GTK 3.14 or not.

Currently, VMware theme works well for me. So, the problem is probably that you have new packages/missing packages compared to your previous installation. You can try to find which library is responsible by reading logs files in /tmp/vmware-$USER/vmware-apploader*.log, then installing/removing the related packages, but it may be complicated.

Alternatively, you can try to export the environment variable GTK_THEME=Breeze-Dark before starting VMPlayer and see if your theme is compatible with GTK 3.14.

Were any of you guys able to make VMplayer use the proper GTK3 theme and icons under KDE (more specifically, Breeze-Dark and Papirus-Dark)? I swear to God. Theming in version 14 didn't work at all for me, but after the 15.0 update, it started to work flawlessly. But then I decided to do a clean install of Arch yesterday, so I installed VMware, but now it doesn't pick up the proper theme and icons, again. I don't get it, it's only happening with VMware amongst all GTK3-based programs. I've tried using VMWARE_USE_SHIPPED_LIBS=1, but it did nothing either. Does anyone have any ideia of what is causing this? VMware always picks up the dark Adwaita theme.

vmAutoStart.xml file is automatically created by VMware if it doesn't exist. On this release, I've added this file in the package, that's why you had this conflict. Deleting this file before upgrading is the right thing to do.