/*---[ Annoyance ]---*/
With Xubuntu 13.04, every time I get a kernel upgrade, which seems to happen at least once a month, my VMWare Player no longer works. I'm sure this is not specific to Xubuntu - probably any Ubuntu-13.04 based distro will have this problem.
The first time it happened, I spent a while trying to fix it and get it to recompile and then ended up deciding to uninstall and reinstall, but even that was a mess because the vmware-uninstaller doesn't work and tells you to use the installer and then I downloaded a really old version of VMWare Player that for some reason VMWare still has up and and came up as a top choice in google. When I installed that, it complained about all sorts of kernel issues, including that it wouldn't install on a system with KVM enabled, so I disabled KVM and it still wouldn't work. Then I figured out I had a really old version (like version 2 instead of 5!).
/*---[ Solution ]---*/
The solution is quite simple, so I'm documenting it here to save others headache.
If you have a kernel upgrade and VMWare player won't start, this is what I do:
- Uninstall:
sudo vmware-installer -u vmware-player - Download the latest VMPlayer for Linux from here: https://www.vmware.com/products/player/
- Reinstall:
sudo ./VMware-Player-5.0.2-1031769.x86_64.bundle
Only takes a few minutes and all is back to normal.
