VMware Workstation Player is a desktop virtualization software that allows you to run multiple isolated operating systems on a single machine.

VMware Player is not open-source. It is free for personal non-commercial use. Oracle’s VirtualBox is an open-source and good alternative to Vmware Player. This article describes how to install VMware Workstation Player on Ubuntu 22.04.

Prerequisites

For proper installation and operation of VMware Player, your system should meet the following requirements:

• 1.3GHz or faster 64-bit CPU, launched in 2011 or later.

• 2 GB RAM minimum

• 4GB RAM or more is recommended.

Installing VMware Workstation Player on Ubuntu

The first step is to install the build dependencies. Open your terminal and run the following commands: Note: The update command is run to ensure that everything is updated with the system and that no package conflicts exist before any new installation so that if our installation causes an issue we can easily troubleshoot it.

sudo apt update
cd Downloads [here is where we shall see our Vmware download]

Click here to download or on your terminal hit the code below.

wget https://www.vmware.com/go/getplayer-linux

The command will download the latest version of VMware Player, which at the time of writing this article that which was used, is version 16.2.3. Once the download has been done make the installation file executable: To run the installation do the following;
sudo ./VMware-Player-Full-16.x.x-18811642.x86_64.bundle Replace x with your actual. The installation may take several minutes. During the installation, you will see information about the progress.

Extracting VMware Installer...done.  
Installing VMware Player 16.2.3  
Configuring...  
[######################################################################] 100%  
Installation was successful.

At this point, you have the VMware Workstation Player installed on your Ubuntu system.

To launch the Player,

• Open the Activities search bar, type “VMware Workstation Player” and click on the icon.

• Another method to launch the Vmware player is by using the command below.

cd /usr/lib/vmware/bin

This bring you into Vmware working directory

Type vmplayer and it will directly launch Vmware Workstation Player

When you start the application for the first time, a window like the following will appear asking you whether you like to use VMware Workstation Player for free for personal non-commercial use:

Uninstalling Vmware Workstation Player on Ubuntu

The process is quite easy without any complications. No need to be in a particular folder to launch this can be done directly on your terminal. sudo vmware-installer -u vmware-player

All configuration information is about to be removed. Do you wish to  
keep your configuration files? You can also input 'quit' or 'q' to  
cancel uninstallation. [yes] yes

Uninstalling VMware Installer 3.0.0  
Deconfiguring...  
[######################################################################] 100%  
Uninstallation was successful.

With that, you have successfully safely uninstalled Vmware Player.