When trying to set up my new Kubuntu install I went to install the VMWare Remote Console, and to my annoyance the installer would fail without any feedback on what was going wrong. Here’s what I needed to do to fix it. To start with , some details of my machines and setup:
Date: 2019-05-24 Machine details from inxi: /m/u/h/j/S/notes> inxi CPU: Dual Core Intel Core i5-6200U (-MT MCP-) speed/min/max: 1468/400/2800 MHz Kernel: 5.0.0-15-generic x86_64 Up: 1h 49m Mem: 4538.0/7719.6 MiB (58.8%) Storage: 238.47 GiB (54.3% used) Procs: 271 Shell: fish 3.0.2 inxi: 3.0.33 VMWare Remote Console Version: 10.0.4 VMware-Remote-Console-10.0.4-11818843.x86_64.bundle
To start with, running the installer from the command like I was getting this error:
~/d> sudo ./VMware-Remote-Console-10.0.4-11818843.x86_64.bundle --console
Extracting VMware Installer...done.
User interface initialization failed. Exiting. Check the log for details.It wasn’t even clear what log file it meant, but after doing some searching on duckduckgo I discoversed the log file for the console installer is /var/log/vmware-installer. Therefore, to get an idea of the issues, I would tail that log like this:
root@jtuckey-x1-ubu:/var/log# tail -f /var/log/vmware-installerTailing that log showed me that there were some issues with libraries being used. To get the installer to run through I needed to install the packages:
- libncursesw5 – for the console interface
- desktop-file-utils – error caused when trying to run
update-desktop-databasecommand from this package
After this I was able to get the installed to run through completely. Hope this helps someone.