Today, I tried to install Workstation 10 on Ubuntu 14.04 x64. When I run vmware with root.
It prompts me license dialog. But when I tried to use trial license, it warns me
"Failed to register license. This may be because the root password is required to register your license. Please contact a system administrator with any questions."
What's the problem, Do anyone can help me? Thank you!
Hi,
I faced this issue when I was trying to install WS on Ubutnu 12.04 LTS. So, after playing
around with many things, I installed one of the previous versions of WS which took the
license entered and got fully installed. And then I was able to install and use WS 10.
Hope this helps though the real issue is unclear.
Cheers,
Raghavan
I'm having the exact same problem. I had a previously licensed version of workstation 9, have upgraded to 10 and getting error message when entering the license key OR trying to accept a trial.
I bumped up against this sometime this morning. It's an annoying fault with a simple fix.
VMware supply their own version of gksu and it can't find some of its dependencies.. I'm sure there is a better fix as the VMware bundle appears to have these libraries, but the quick and easy fix was
apt-get install libstartup-notification0 libgtop2-7
brad@cadbox:/usr/lib/vmware/bin$ ldd /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgksu2.so.0/libgksu2.so.0
linux-vdso.so.1 => (0x00007fffa41ff000)
libutil.so.1 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libutil.so.1 (0x00007f8013a03000)
libstartup-notification-1.so.0 => not found
libgtop-2.0.so.7 => not found
libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0 (0x00007f80133c3000)
libc.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (0x00007f8013039000
I installed libgtop and libstartup-notification and the problem magically went away.
i also solved/got around it, but in a different way. i uninstalled workstation. removed old kernel header files
sudo apt-get remove linux-headers-
sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r)
reinstalled the same vmware image (10.0.3)
entered key during install process
all good.
I gave up to install Workstation on my server, It added lots of iptable entries to ruin my original settings, but thank you all. I will give it a try when I get a new box.
I just worked my way through this. The answer is twofold, at least with the current 12 pro installer. There's a script (wrapper-gtk24.sh) that adds all the many directories containing the shared libs to the LD_LIBRARY_PATH. But it doesn't have any entry for libgtop, even though that is shipped. It doesn't have an entry for libstartup-notification, either, and that one is not shipped. So your solution works, but you can get away with just installing startup-notification and doing "LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/vmware/libgtop-2.0.so.7 vmware". Looks like they don't test this on a system without all those shipped libraries.
In my case, I was able to register Workstation in Trial mode by finding a product key in the vmware-apploader logs (/tmp/vmware-<non-root username>/vmware-apploader-<numeric ID>.log on my system) after running the VMware GUI and entering that key through a GUI accessed with "sudo /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-enter-serial".
The line containing the key is: Invocation: Invocation: "/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-gksu --sudo-mode --message=Please enter your password to proceed. /usr/lib/vmware/bin/licenseTool enter ABCDE-12345-FGHIJ-67890-A1B2C 10.0+ VMware Workstation /usr/lib/vmware"
where "ABCDE-12345-FGHIJ-67890-A1B2C"is the product key.
I hit this with an upgrade to workstation 15 on ubuntu
open a terminal and run
sudo vmware
This will allow you to enter your license key. Then close and you can run vmware workstation as a normal user.
Here is the actual error:
Authentication is needed to run `/usr/lib/vmware/bin/licenseTool' as the super user
I think there is some problem requesting permissions so just run in terminal as root as a once off to set the licence
I'm running Fedora 29 now. Kernel 5.0.6-200.fc29.x86_64. Using Xfce4. It's amazing to me that this bug (ok, this *symptom*) is still occurring FIVE years later.
VMWare installed fine - Fedora 29 is officially supported now. But, on starting VMWare, you get the 'enter license key' dialog, and no matter what happens, you see: "Failed to register license. This may be because the root password is required to register your license. Please contact a system administrator with any questions."
I am a linux master. A guru. I hacked at this for hours - scripting, hacking, symlinking vmware libraries (without trashing the rest of my system).
In the end, the only thing that worked is uninstalling, and entering my (newly-received valid license key) during install.
I just wanted google to find this so others can find this "solution" more quickly.
N.B. The vmware-supplied libraries are not configured correctly - they can't even find each other. LD_LIBRARY_PATH was carefully (surgically!) configured by software I wrote, and that did not avoid this error message. So I never did identify root cause.