Fedora 23 and VMWare Workstation 12.1

In the post about VMWare 11 I wrote about the problem that newest Fedoras are compiled using gcc5 which breaks C++ ABI thus making VMWare unrunnable. Several commenters suggested workarounds of which the simplest and most elegant solution is by user Andy who suggested that before running vmware command the environment variable LD_PRELOAD should be set to /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libglibmm-2.4.so.1/libglibmm-2.4.so.1, i.e. you should execute the following command:

export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/vmware/lib/libglibmm-2.4.so.1/libglibmm-2.4.so.1 /usr/bin/vmware

This works for VMWare 12 as it did for VMWare 11.

Now, at some point it will happen that VMWare notifies you about newer version and offers you to download it and install it. But, you won't be able to run update and you'll receive the following error message:

/tmp/vmis.lLCMq3/install/vmware-installer/vmware-installer: line 56: 14595 Aborted (core dumped) VMWARE_INSTALLER="$VMWARE_INSTALLER" VMISPYVERSION="$VMISPYVERSION" "$VMWARE_INSTALLER"/vmis-launcher "$VMWARE_INSTALLER"/vmware-installer.py "$@"

What you have to do in that case is to manually download update and start it without defining LD_PRELOAD variable. Note that if you changed /usr/bin/vmware after upgrade you'll have to change it again.

VMWare Workstation 10/11 on Fedora 23 Beta

UPDATE. Take a look at the comment by Vincent Cojot below for a solution on how to run VMWare Workstation/Player on Fedora 23. Take care only to go into /usr/lib/vmware/lib instead of /usr/lib/vmware as pointed out by wolf (comment after), but other than that, everything works! Note that you must not change and/or set LD_LIBRARY_PATH as first suggested by this post!

I decided to upgrade one of my laptops from Fedora 22 to the newest Fedora 23 Beta. The upgrade process went smoothly but when I tried to run VMWare, it just silently failed. Googling around for Fedora 23 and VMWare Workstation didn't help. Then, I stumbled on this thread, about the problem that VMWare installation has with GCC 5.1 used on SuSE. Turns out that the same version is used on Fedora 23, so I tried the solution from a given thread which suggest the modification of LD_LIBRARY_PATH due to the missing symbol in system provided library gtkmm:

$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/vmware/lib/libglibmm-2.4.so.1/:/usr/lib64/gtk-2.0/modules/:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
$ vmware
(vmware-modconfig:11918): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: "adwaita",
(vmware-modconfig:11918): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: "adwaita",
/usr/share/themes/Adwaita/gtk-2.0/gtkrc:1163: error: unexpected identifier `direction', expected character `}'
/usr/share/themes/Adwaita/gtk-2.0/gtkrc:1163: error: unexpected identifier `direction', expected character `}'
(vmware-tray:12017): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: "adwaita",
(vmware-tray:12017): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: "adwaita",
/usr/share/themes/Adwaita/gtk-2.0/gtkrc:1163: error: unexpected identifier `direction', expected character `}'

Basically, this helped a bit because now vmware doesn't fail silently. Yet, it still doesn't start. In the end, it seems that the problem is a bit more complex, as explained in this thread, so in case you need VMWare Workstation, don't upgrade yet. :)