VMware Workstation cannot create ~/.vmware directory

Question

I just installed VMware Workstation 8.0.3 on ubuntu 12.04. Everytime it starts up it says that vmware needs ~/.vmware to save preferences and that it is unable to create ~/.vmware.

But ~/.vmware is already a directory. How do I get this resolved?

Solution 1

You should never run as root unless you are explicitly trying to modify your system. VMWare Workstation does not need root access to simply run a guest machine. Likely your permission were changed to root owning your ~/.vmware folder during install. You just need to change the ownership back to your user.

sudo chown -R $USER:$USER ~/.vmware

This will set the owner back to you and your group.

Solution 2

I had the same problem with VMWare Player 6.0 in Ubuntu 13.10

I solved it by using:

chown -R $USER:$USER ~/.vmware

Comments

[Eliah Kagan]

This might be a permissions problem, caused by having run VMware as root (but there are other possible causes too). Please edit your question to add the output of these three commands (run them in the Terminal, which you can open by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T): [1] ls -ldh ~/.vmware [2] ls -lRh ~/.vmware [3] df -h Please also add the complete and exact text of the error messages, as well as the the text you get in the Terminal when you try to start vmware there (when it's not already running).

[pecuna]

This helped on Ubuntu 14.04 64bit and Workstation 10.02: sudo chown -R username:username ~/.vmware Thanks for helping this out ldgriffin and daviderault Regards

[nanofarad]

Running as root will not help an issue of writing to one's home folder. Read the error carefully, please.

[Eliah Kagan]

It might, since the problem is that part of the user's home folder has come to be owned by root. It's still a bad idea though--instead, ownership should be retaken on the affected files.