How to save vmware player library?

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?

Solution 1:

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.

Solution 2:

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.