Can't Install VMWare WorkStation 16 on Fedora 34 Silverblue

I’m trying to install VMWare WorkStation on SilverBlue (Fedora 34) and it’s not working. I’ve moved it from downloads to the Home directory and here are the commands I’ve ran so far:

[liamb-perspvt@liampersonal home]$ ls
bobbyb-fmv  liamb-perspvt  liamdev  VMware-Player-16.1.2-17966106.x86_64.bundle
[liamb-perspvt@liampersonal home]$ chmod +X VMware-Player-16.1.2-17966106.86_64.bundle
chmod: cannot access 'VMware-Player-16.1.2-17966106.86_64.bundle': No such file or directory
[liamb-perspvt@liampersonal home]$ chmod +X VMware-Player-16.1.2-17966106.x86_64.bundle
[liamb-perspvt@liampersonal home]$ ./VMware-Player-16.1.2-17966106.x86_64.bundle
Extracting VMware Installer...done.
root access is required for the operations you have chosen.
[liamb-perspvt@liampersonal home]$ sudo ./VMware-Player-16.1.2-17966106.x86_64.bundle
[sudo] password for liamb-perspvt: 
Extracting VMware Installer...done.
Rolling back VMware Installer 3.0.0
    Deconfiguring...
[#                                                                     ]   1%

[######################################################################] 100%
Installation was unsuccessful.
[liamb-perspvt@liampersonal home]$ 

I’ve also tried running:

$ bash VMware-Player-16.1.2-17966106.x86_64.bundle --ignore-errors

Didn’t work

Lastly, per this post Solved: Re: VMware Workstation installer fails on Fedora 3... - VMware Technology Network VMTN - I’ve tried:

$ bash vmware-installer-wrapper.sh VMware-Player-16.1.2-17966106.x86_64.bundle

Didn’t work

Here's the run/usr/1000/doc/XXXX.log

"2021-09-17T05:00:28.468-04:00| host-15029| I005: Log for VMware Workstation pid=15029 version=16.1.2 build=build-17966106 option=Release
2021-09-17T05:00:28.468-04:00| host-15029| I005: The host is 64-bit.
2021-09-17T05:00:28.468-04:00| host-15029| I005: Host codepage=UTF-8 encoding=UTF-8
2021-09-17T05:00:28.468-04:00| host-15029| I005: Host is Linux 5.13.15-200.fc34.x86_64 Fedora 34.20210915.0 (Silverblue) Fedora 34
2021-09-17T05:00:28.468-04:00| host-15029| I005: DictionaryLoad: Cannot open file "/etc/vmware/config": No such file or directory.
2021-09-17T05:00:28.468-04:00| host-15029| I005: [msg.dictionary.load.openFailed] Cannot open file "/etc/vmware/config": No such file or directory.
2021-09-17T05:00:28.468-04:00| host-15029| I005: PREF Optional preferences file not found at /etc/vmware/config. Using default values.
2021-09-17T05:00:28.468-04:00| host-15029| I005: DictionaryLoad: Cannot open file "/usr/lib/vmware/settings": No such file or directory."

no idea what’s going on and trying all of this si where more technical than I actually am. i prefer a GUI very much so and GUI instructios would be greatly appreciated.

I understand Gnome Boxes is great but can’t get it easily provisioned on other Operating systems which is where these will eventually need to move and I’m unfamiliar with Virtual Machine Manager - the other popular Linux VM provisioner - so I’d like to just stick with VM Ware for now. Plus i’ll be testing other stuff with them. Can anyone help? Thanks.

Does vmware work on Fedora Silverblue? I can’t imagine it would given how vmware and silverblue both work. That being said, I have never tried it myself so I can’t say that definitively.

You can’t run all Linux software on silverblue.

I know this isn’t directly helpful but I can tell you that I am running vmware workstation pro on the normal Fedora 34 without issue.

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Well, it’s the most helpful so far. I’m beginning to wonder if I should just use Fedora Workstation as the main OS and partition my PC to run Workstation on one side and Fedora Silverblue on the other.

I can build out a raspberry pi and get ESXi up and running on there (just did it last week) but I can’t seem to get Silverblue to work with VMware. My speculation is that it’s really just in the bash script because the VMWare installer aims to install it on the regular root directory and Silverblue puts everything (I believe) layered on top of VAR. I don’t know how to edit this script or where it even is and what I would put to redirect it - because as you can see, it fails at 1% and the logs suggest that as well ha.

I am not an expert on Silverblue, but here is my understanding. Most of it lives in an immutable os-tree structure. Most of the writable sections live in /var and are symlinked elsewhere. However, this is limited to only a handful locations. Most of the filesystem is completely read-only. I am not sure what you could do to make that work with vmware.

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Silverblue looks to me like a long-term work-in-progress project.
You should carefully consider its pros and cons, especially in practice.
For me, its benefits are mostly virtual without practical advantage.
But the increase in complexity and maintainability costs are real.

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