UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u201c' in position 428: ordinal not in range(128) during VMware Workstation installation

By | August 24, 2015

I've decided to "return" to use VMware Workstation because I used Oracle VirtualBox for some years and this is a time for changes! Ok, the main reason is that I can connect to vCenter by VMware Workstation ๐Ÿ˜‰

An installation of VMware Workstation is pretty easy but it didn't want to work ๐Ÿ™‚ I got two problems during the installation process on Fedora 20:

Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module"

Of course the canberra package was installed but the path to lib was not defined correctly so the installator was not able to find the lib. To solve the problem please:

Please create file (as root) /etc/ld.so.conf.d/gtk2.conf and add line: /usr/lib64/gtk-2.0/modules

sudo touch /etc/ld.so.conf.d/gtk2.conf

sudo echo /usr/lib64/gtk-2.0/modules >> /etc/ld.so.conf.d/gtk2.conf

Run as root: ldconfig

sudo /sbin/ldconfig

The second problem was that the installation failed (unsuccessful) even I accepted EULA:

workstationIn the installation log (/var/log/vmware-installer) I could find the following error:

UnicodeEncodeError: โ€˜asciiโ€™ codec canโ€™t encode character uโ€™\u201cโ€™ in position 428: ordinal not in range(128)

The problem is related to encoding and to solve it you have to run the following command before running the VMware Workstation installer:

export PYTHONIOENCODING=utf-8

Author: Mariusz

Architect (~ 15 years experience based on passion...) with strong background as a System Administrator and Engineer. Focused on Data Center Solutions: Virtualization/Cloud Computing and Storage/Backup Systems. Currently living in Poland.