Installing VMWare Player on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

Image by GPT-4o

In 2024, VMware made some significant changes to its product lineup. VMware Workstation Player and VMware Fusion Player were discontinued. However, if you are still looking to download VMWare Player, there is still a way to do that.

In this tutorial, I will walk you through how to download VMWare Player. This tutorial is based on software packages available to download from https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds/vmw-desktop/player/ at the time of writing. I have saved a version of VMWare Player 17.5.1 on https://github.com/rahulbhadani/medium.com/releases/tag/VMWarePlayer17.5.1 in case Broadcomm decided to purge the webpage.

Once you download, VMWare Player 17.5.1 zip file, extract it and run the following inside the extracted folder:

sudo bash VMware-Player-17.5.1-23298084.x86_64.bundle

It will install the player, however, you might encounter an error:

Figure 1. VMWare Player Error

In order to rectify this error, follow the guideline below:

git clone https://github.com/mkubecek/vmware-host-modules
cd vmware-host-modules
git switch workstation-17.5.1
make
sudo make install