Installing VMware Player in Linux (Tutorial)

In this article, I will be showing you how to install the latest version of Vmware Player on a Linux Distro. For the tutorial I will be using Ubuntu, in particular Ubuntu Mate. I choose Vmware Player over Oracles Virtual Box, due to a number of reasons including simplicity and performance.

Navigate to the official Vmware website which currently is here.

It should look like this:

From here, go to downloads and click “Workstation Player”. I have marked the option in red for demonstration in this article.

Once on the product download page, click “VMware Workstation 12.5.7 Player for Linux 64-bit.”.

12.5.7 is the current version at the time of this article and is the version that we will be installing.

After clicking download you should see a confirmation window that looks like this:

The file size should be 128 MB, and will present itself as a .bundle file.

When the download is complete, open up a terminal by pressing: Ctrl+Alt+T

Once the terminal is open, enter the following command to install the required build package and kernel headers:

It should be noted that you should do your research before installing anything via the command line.

To find out more about the command mentioned, check out the following forum posts.

Once the download is finished, it should appear in your Downloads folder, or whatever folder you have designated for Downloads.

We now need to make the Vmware file executable. Go to the Vmware file, right click it and select “Properties”.

Out of the 5 tabs, select “Permissions”, and check the box that says, “Allow executing file as program”.

Open up another terminal by pressing: Ctrl+Alt+T, and run the following command which will run the Vmware Player Install window:

You should now see a screen like this:

Once you have accepted the license agreements, Vmware will begin to install. Once the installation is complete you will see a screen like this:

Vmware Player can be found under Application System ToolsVMware Player in Ubuntu.

Conclusion:

Now that you have the latest version of Vmware installed, you can proceed to install your first Virtual Machine. While that is out of the scope of this article, it is pretty straight forward and there are plenty of tutorials on setting up Virtual Machines.

Virtual Machines act as Virtual Computers, and can provide a secure sandboxed environment to work in. Anything from the latest version of Windows to your favourite Linux Distro can be run using Vmware. When setup properly, a Virtual Machine can be a safer option when using TOR, instead of running TOR directly from your Desktop.