I have been working at this problem for 2 days now. I cannot for the life of me enable 3D support in VMWare 9 guests.

My specifications are:

Hardware: Dell Latitude E5520 laptop.
Processor: Intel i7-2620M CPU @ 2.70GHz × 4.
Memory: 8GB.
Video: Intel Sandybridge Mobile x86/MMX/SSE2
OS: Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS, 32 bit.
Vmware Workstation: 9.0.1 build-894247
Glxgears functions fine. Frame rate is ~60fps.
Vmware guest: Windows 7

Starting the Windows 7 guest in VMware throws the following errors:

1. No 3D support is available from the host. and
2. Hardware graphics acceleration is not available.

I've read through this VMware forum thread, but again the hardware in the post is different (nVidia).

I've followed the instructions at this Ask Ubuntu post as closely as possible as the question is nearly the same as mine although my hardware is different.

Answer 1 regarding setting mks.gl.allowBlacklistedDrivers = TRUE; in my vmx configuration file causes the VM to crash when it starts.

The second answer I followed as closely as possible.

• I uninstalled VMware,
• Did sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r) at a terminal,
• Added the PPA https://launchpad.net/~glasen/+archive/intel-driver,
• Then at a terminal did sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y

I reinstalled VMware and have the same results: no 3D in guests.

I'm getting the feeling that something is awry with the Sandy Bridge driver, but I can't seem to come up with any solutions. Has anyone out there run across this problem also?

By the way, the operation of the likes of Solidworks and AutoCad within a Windpws 7 guest does appear to be improved in VMware 9 vs VMware 8 in spite of the fact that 3D support is lacking in the Windows 7 guest.

I'd also add that my glxinfo file was nearly identical to the glxinfo file posted at askubuntu.com/questions/181829/…. I had a total of seven minor differences per a comparison using Meld. –