VMware Workstation 12.x.x for latest openSUSE Tumbleweed

As you know Tumbleweed is constantly churning and as such there are points in time where some of the libraries required to run VMware Workstation get a new version that isn't compatible with the latest release or the version you have installed. Mostly the Kernel problems get worked around with simple patches so that the vmmon and vmnet drivers can compile correctly and I've posted a few here on my blog with a tool that can help as well. See my post from January.

So what if for example (which is what happened this month with a newer library version of curl) that we have a newer version of library than what is supported by VMware Workstation. So you go ahead and launch vmware, but no VMware Workstation windows opens. The first thing you can do is inspect the log craeted at /tmp/vmware-<your_home_user>/vmware-apploader-<some_number>.log. It will show you in the beginning which libraries it will be using from either SYSTEM or SHIPPED with VMware Workstation. From the output this month we have the following which is suspect in our log.

017-03-24T08:59:45.773-06:00| appLoader| I125: Marking libxml2.so.2 node as SHIPPED.
2017-03-24T08:59:45.773-06:00| appLoader| I125: Marking libview.so.3 node as SHIPPED.
2017-03-24T08:59:45.773-06:00| appLoader| I125: Marking libXrandr.so.2 node as SYSTEM.
2017-03-24T08:59:45.789-06:00| appLoader| I125: System libcurl.so.4 has OpenSSL version OpenSSL/1.0.2k, ours is OpenSSL/1.0.2k.
2017-03-24T08:59:45.789-06:00| appLoader| I125: System libcurl.so.4 has version 7.53.1 (need 7.51.0) and has been compiled with c-ares support (SSL compatibility? yes).
2017-03-24T08:59:45.789-06:00| appLoader| I125: Marking libcurl.so.4 node as SYSTEM.

Since libcurl.so.4 was marked as SYSTEM we know that it is trying to use the library from our installed packages. libcurl had some recent upgrades. We can try to mitigate this in two ways.

We can execute from the command line forcing to use all SHIPPED libraries from VMware Workstation.

# VMWARE_USE_SHIPPED_LIBS=force vmware &

We can force the one library to be run from the SHIPPED libraries by running the following.

# export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/vmware/lib/libcurl.so.4:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

# vmware & 

Both ways are acceptable, but in some cases the later can have better performance in my experience.

Hopefully this can help with future changes in openSUSE Tumbleweed and ensure that you can continue to run VMware Workstation no matter the outcome of the installed packages.

Enjoy!