This issue is supposedly fixed here: vmware-workstation: remove shipped fonts.conf by deinferno · Pull Request #177286 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub
The problem is - I don’t have any idea how to implement this fix!
I’d really appreciate some help regarding how to translate the “fix” in this website into the configuration.nix file!!
Things submitted as pull requests to github eventually make it into NixOS releases. There should be nothing you need to do but wait and switch to a newer version once it becomes available.
Currently, that commit is only available in master, but it has been around since June. This means it will make it into the next release (22.11, should hit late this month or early next), and you can currently use it if you use unstable. There’s instructions on that here: NixOS 22.11 manual
You can also use a single package from unstable if you want to and keep the rest of your system stable. This takes a bit more effort, though. NixOS can make no stability guarantees if you do this either, so probably don’t do this too much, but it’s arguably better than sitting around with broken software.
To do so, you need to add the unstable channel to your system under a different name than your current one, and then import it in your configuration and set the package from it as virtualisation.vmware.host.package. Something like:
let
# nixpkgs-unstable would be the name of the channel, see manual
nixpkgs-unstable = import <nixpkgs-unstable> { };
in {
virtualisation.vmware.host.package = nixpkgs-unstable.vmware-workstation;
}
This changes if you use flakes or niv, but I assume you don’t.
TLATER, thanks so much for your informative reply. I’m absolutely not a power user, and I’m a complete newbie to NixOS, having used it for just a couple of weeks. So I really appreciate your explanation.
I’ll look forward to a fixed version of VMWare in NixOS 22.11.
In your configuration.nix file, you can add the following lines:
# PR 177286
# https://discourse.nixos.org/t/resolved-font-issue-with-vmware-workstation/19669/6
virtualisation.vmware.host.package = let
pr_177286 = import (fetchTarball "https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/5f46ce46b3a56485947f06541c048ad596c2885b.tar.gz") { config = pkgs.config; };
in pkgs.lib.trace "Using PR 177286 for VMWare Workstation: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/177286" pr_177286.vmware-workstation;
This will install the fixed Vmware-workstation package.
Wow, hpoussin, that code sure did the job!! I wouldn’t have been able to figure that out in a hundred years!! I’ll run VMWare this way until the 22.11 version comes out.
With this fixed, I have one more question: what does one do when a package is reported as “broken”? For example, there’s a package called ocenaudio which wouldn’t install because it was “broken”. Is there a place to report broken packages, or is “broken” something to do with my individual configuration?
Once again, thanks to both of you for your enormous help!