vmware Player 3.0.0 font problem: default GUI font selected by vmplayer unreadable

[sres]

Since upgrading from vmware Player 2.x to 3.0 I have a problem with fonts used in the vmplayer GUI (not inside the virtual machine!). By default, vmplayer seems to select a font which cannot be used for Western languages. Hence, all menus are unreadable (see attached screenshot).

How can I set a default font for vmplayer? Possibly this may include setting a default font in some global GTK config file? However, please note that this problem is specific to vmplayer; no other programs exhibit this problem!

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Software: vmware Player 3.0.0 build-203739

Platform: x86_64

Host OS: openSUSE Linux 11.2 64-bit

Guest OS: Windows XP Pro / any

[sres]

This is not a solution (that would need to come from vmware programmers), but a workaround:

Explanation:

vmware uses its own GTK library with its own configuration file. Global or user gtkrc files (like ~/.gtkrc-2.0) are ignored. Therefore any font configuration options (which may habe been written to ~/.gtkrc-2.0 by KDE's Control Center, kcontrol) are ignored. vmware's own GTK configuration file cannot handle some (system) font installations and thereby creates this problem.

Workaround:

Edit vmplayer's/vmware's own gtkrc file to override the wrongly selected font by performing following actions (as root):

cp -p /usr/lib/vmware/libconf/etc/gtk-2.0/gtkrc /usr/lib/vmware/libconf/etc/gtk-2.0/gtkrc.orig

vi /usr/lib/vmware/libconf/etc/gtk-2.0/gtkrc (or use your editor of choice!) to add the following lines:

style "user-font" { font_name="Bitstream Vera Sans 10" } widget_class "*" style "user-font"

gtk-font-name="Bitstream Vera Sans 10"

Of course you can replace the font name (here Bitstream Vera Sans) and size (here 10) according to your preference and installed font.

Hope this helps,

sres.