Notes of a Programmer
Monday, November 7, 2016
VMWare Unity Mode on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
Some users want to run Linux desktop guests «seamlessly» within host operating systems, for which, VMWare Hypervisors provides a functionality called VMware «Unity» mode.
This post is about how we can enable the Unity mode on Linux desktop guests running Ubuntu 16.04, well, if you are willing to settle on an older version of WMware Workstation or Player.
In fact, it becomes difficult to enable the «Unity» mode for Linux guests. If you visit my older post on enabling VMware Unity mode on Ubuntu 14.04, you can see many have encountered difficulties, myself included. In particular, it is getting more difficult to enable the Unity mode on recent releases of desktop editions of Linux distributions. In my opinion, the difficulties come form the following three sources,
- Apparently, VMWare has recently dropped the support of Unity mode for Linux guests. You can infer this by comparing the documentation of VMware Workstation Player 12 with that of the previous version of the player, the VMware Player 7. VMware’s Workstation Player 12 documentation now states,
»
Use Unity Mode
You can switch virtual machines that have Windows XP or later guest operating systems to Unity mode to display applications directly on the host system desktop.
«
»
Use Unity Mode
You can switch virtual machines that have Linux or Windows 2000 or later guest operating systems to Unity mode to display applications directly on the host system desktop.
«
It is clearly that Linux support has been dropped.
Unity mode requiresMetaCity or KDE, which does not appear to be the default and optimization objective for major Linux distributions.
However, having observed the above, we actually have a solution.
- Hypervisor. We need to stick to the version of VMware Workstation or Player that supports the Unity mode. The newest version of Player that supports the Unity mode is actually VMWare Player 7.1.4. You can download it from VMware
- Linux Guest Dekstop Environment. We need to stick to Gnome 2 MetaCity or KDE.
For Ubuntu 16.04, we can enable Unity mode using VMware Player by following the steps below,
- Download and install VMware Player 7.1.4. Note that neither any version older than 7.1.4 nor any version newer than VMware Player, such as VMware Workstation 12 will work.
- In Ubuntu 16.04, install Gnome Flashback as follows,
- From the menu of VMware Player, choose «Player», «Manage», and «Install VMware Tools» (or Reinstall VMware Tools»). Make sure that you are installing VMwareTools 9.9.5. Earlier version would crash the vmtools library at the Ubuntu guest when you attempt to switch to Unity mode.
In the Ubuntu Linux guest, extract the mounted VMwareTools image, and run «vmware-install.pl» to install the VMware Tools.
- Upon successfully installation of the VMware Tools, log out.
- When you log in, on the screen of the Display Manager, make sure that you select «GNOME Flashback (Metacity)» as shown below.
- Upon log in, you should be able to switch to the VMware Unity mode.
Источник
VMware Workstation 12 discards unity support for Linux
As of VMware Workstation 12.0 unity support for Linux has been removed. Whereas unity support for Windows 10 is one of the few areas where there is actually additional support for Windows 10, that same feature has been ripped out for Linux hosts and guests.
Here’s the excerpt from the release notes:
The following features have reached end of life in Workstation 12 Pro and have been removed:
Unity mode on Linux guest and host operating systems
Integrated Virtual Debugger Visual Studio
Connection to the VMware vCloud Air subscription service (The VMware vCloud Air OnDemand service is still fully supported)
Wow.. as just wow. That is a huge blow for Linux desktop users.
Guess it is not broken anymore in Fusion 8 / Workstation 12 / Player 12 as it simply does not exist anymore.
A VMware developer mentions at VMTN that the feature was removed because it wasn’t used much according to feedback.
Yes, we’ve dropped support for Unity for Linux guests only. It’s sad to see the feature go, but our feedback indicates that Linux Unity was rarely used, and it was exceedingly difficult to maintain it at a level of quality our customers expect, so we took the tough decision to remove it.
I wonder where they get the feedback from? Is that the telemetry options that I disable by default? Have they contacted Linux users?
Note that the feature is removed for both Linux hosts as well as Linux guests , the VMware developer there – who clearly is not involved with the development of this feature – wasn’t aware of that at the time of his reply.
Did I use unity myself often? No, but I mostly use the command line, for desktop use I have Windows and OS X. The few times I did use it lately for Linux guests, it was not behaving well, I consider the feature broken with a recent Linux desktop and VMware Workstation 11 / Fusion 7 so yes it was unusable and hence not used.
What strikes me as odd even more is that the feature is available at the competition.
Parallels and VirtualBox support it just fine. So if you need this feature … then log a support request at VMware so that they know you depend on the feature or complain at the forums if you don’t currently have support.
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Unity mode missing in VMware 15 Workstation Player [Ubuntu 18.04 LTS]
I have recently installed VMware Workstation 15 Player on my Ubuntu 18.04 laptop and and installed Windows 7 as the guest OS in VMware. I have installed VMware Tools and everything seems fine. I wanted to try out Unity mode, but can’t seem to find it under Virtual Machine -> Virtual Machine Settings -> Options. The documentation repeatedly shows that Unity mode can be found in the Options menu. Why am I not seeing it? What am I missing?
Settings
Hardware»/>
VM Settings -> Hardware
Options»/>
VM Settings -> Options
1 Answer 1
The following features have reached end of life in Workstation 12 Player [. and later] and have been removed:
- Unity mode on Linux guest and host operating systems
Unity mode on Linux guest and host operating systems has also been removed from VMware Workstation 12 and later.
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VMWare Unity Mode with Ubuntu 12.10
This is a very difficult thing to search for, and find an answer to because of the unfortunate choice VMWare and Ubuntu both having something called «Unity». My host operating system is Windows 7 — 64 bit, running VMWare Workstation 9.0.1. I have a virtual machine running Ubuntu 12.10 — 64 bit. When I attempt to put VMWare in «Unity mode», I get the following message:
From the VMWare site, there is nothing listed that says that Ubuntu is not supported for this. and I have installed the latest vmware-tools on the guest operating system. It seems like a lot of people have had this issue, but I haven’t seen a good resolution to it yet. Does anyone know how to get Unity mode working with Ubuntu?
4 Answers 4
I had the same problem. I thought it is just Ubuntu 12.10, so I setup 12.04 in Vmware Workstation 9 and had the same result. You’re right, it’s hard to find the solution for this. The problem is Unity Desktop (in Ubuntu), so I switched to gnome3.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gnome-shell
Log out and click the circle to change between desktop environment
I’ve installed several flavors of Ubuntu on virtual machines, using both VMware Player and Virtualbox, and Vincent’s answer is absolutely correct. VMware hates the Ubuntu desktop called Unity (unfortunately, as mentioned before, this shares a name with VMware’s own Unity Mode). This is just one more reason to avoid Ubuntu’s proprietary desktop.
My suggestion, is you MUST use Ubuntu, try Xubuntu, which uses the XFCE desktop, and is fully compatible with both VMware’s Unity Mode, and Virtualbox’s Seamless Mode. As an added bonus, XFCE is lighter, faster, offers a better workflow, and (IMO) prettier that Unity Desktop, which I avoid like the plague.
Another option, which may be even better than using XFCE, is to use a more stable distribution that utilizes the older Gnome 2 desktop. An excellent choice for this is CentOS, which is a fully RedHat compatible distribution. It works perfectly with VMware. It is not suitable for those that want the newest, prettiest, most cutting edge software (i.e. Pipelight, newer versions of LibreOffice, etc. ) but if you want a rock solid development, programming platform that is VERY bug free it would work very well.
Last thought, Linux Mint’s MATE desktop is simply a Gnome 2 fork, so would probably offer an excellent alternative for those who need cutting edge software and VM compatibility. It also has the advantage of being based on Ubuntu, so there would be no need to adjust to the idiosyncrasies of a new Linux distro.
Anyhow, that is altogether too much info, but it’s late, and I can’t sleep. I hope this was marginally helpful.
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Vmware player linux unity
- VMware Technology Network
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- Fusion 8.x and Unity with Linux?
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Did VMWare drop all Linux Unity support as of Fusion 8.x?
Updated Open a Windows Application While You Are In Unity View to remove references to Linux applications. Beginning with Fusion 8.0, Unity View on Linux is no longer supported.
I was aware of some problems with the latest Ubuntu, but I was assuming the others would still be supported, that it would all be fixed eventually, but this appears to say that the Unity view has been dropped entirely for Linux VMs under Fusion 8.x. It appears to be something that Parallels continues to support.
So what exactly is the story?
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That is correct, VMware has dropped all unity support for Linux guests with Fusion 8.x
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That is correct, VMware has dropped all unity support for Linux guests with Fusion 8.x
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I would have thought though that VMware would have underlined the loss of function more (like in the announcements), rather than bury it some documentation (which, lets face facts, nobody reads before buying/upgrading). The stuff about «Unity not used» is pretty likely to be not true, that is just spin .
Parallels (which is the main competitive product to Fusion) has Coherence View mode (their version of Unity) as the default mode of operation:
What seems more likely is that the VMware rewrite to get better speed, which is nice where it works, left out Linux, or VMware could not get it to work properly, so they just dropped it for now, but the way this was handled is not very client friendly. This is a pretty significant loss of function.
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Question: Could this issue be related to the problems that I am seeing when installing Linux for use in Full Screen mode? See this thread:
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Nope, unity for Linux guests in Fusion 8.x is non existent, disappeared, gone, nada.. not there.
Read your post, but it is a tad bit vague.
«Some of the distros have open-vm-tools pre-installed»
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Nope, unity for Linux guests in Fusion 8.x is non existent, disappeared, gone, nada.. not there.
Read your post, but it is a tad bit vague.
«Some of the distros have open-vm-tools pre-installed»
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Well, I guess, while I am none-too-happy (yes, to the point I am researching Parallels much more seriously) with the decision to drop Unity for Linux under VMWare Fusion, that we have at this point an answer, so I have marked the question answered.
Before I leave the topic, let me just say, I am a little worried here, obviously dropping functionality is never particularly good, but with the Dell deal, I am concerned that it is a sign of further things to come (or not come). Dell is obviously a PC-company, it is to some degree in competition with Apple and OS X, and Apple Mac sale is at some point a lost Dell PC/Windows sale. Dell may be thinking why spend money to help Apple. I do wonder a bit if the pre-sale to Dell VMWare would have given greater emphasis to fixing this gap. This leaves me with some FUD as regards Fusion as a long term product.
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Hi there
Let me start by saying clearly. and I met with Michal Dell personally. that we’re not going to mess with the Fusion business 
As for Linux Unity, the decision to remove Linux guest Unity support was a tough one.
It came down to us needing to allocate resources to enhancing features that are more frequently used and fixing bugs that affect more users, based on our opt-in telemetry data.
Unity is an incredibly expensive feature to maintain, so it was just a matter of prioritization.
Hope that quells some concerns about the long-term viability. I wish our telemetry data showed more Linux desktop OS usage to justify the development investment, and perhaps Linux Guest users are more actively opting-out, but that was the call we had to make at the time.
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