Having just installed vmplayer on openSUSE Leap 15.1 and find it can only run as root:
I/O warning : failed to load external entity "/etc/vmware/hostd/proxy.xml"
==== AUTHENTICATING FOR org.freedesktop.policykit.exec ====
Authentication is needed to run `/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-setup-helper' as the super user
Authenticating as: root
Password:
polkit-agent-helper-1: error response to PolicyKit daemon: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.PolicyKit1.Error.Failed: No session for cookie
==== AUTHENTICATION FAILED ====
Error executing command as another user: Not authorized
ie. it asks for root password whenever it starts, but even with this cannot proceed.
When the player is run as root it works, but I do not think this is satisfactory. How can I run the player with normal user permissions?