Installing WMware Workstation and an Xubuntu virtual machine

VMware Workstation Player installation

Installation of VMware Workstation Player is pretty straight forward.  Download the program from https://www.vmware.com/ .  At that site, navigate to Products->Personal Desktop->Workstation Player which will land you at https://www.vmware.com/products/workstation-player.html .  Click the Download Now button and get VMware Workstation 15.1.0 Player for Windows 64-bit Operating Systems.  Run the installation executable.

Xubuntu download

Xubuntu is one of the official flavors of Ubuntu.  It uses the Xfce desktop.  (An official flavor of Ubuntu uses the full Ubuntu archive for packages and updates and is on the same development and release cycle as main Ubuntu. https://ubuntu.com/download/flavours )  Download the installation image from https://xubuntu.org/ .   Get the latest LTS (Long Term Support) version, currently 18.04 Bionic Beaver.  The LTS versions have maintenance updates for essentially five years.  LTS versions are released every two years in April (14.04, 16.04, 18.04).  An estimated 95% of Ubuntu installations are LTS releases. https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle  On the download page, follow the link to the United States mirror.  Get the latest 64 bit iso - xubuntu-18.04.3-desktop-amd64.iso - as of this writing.  The file size is 1.4 GiB.

Run VMware Workstation

Run VMware Workstation Player and select Create a New Virtual Machine.  Choose Installer disc image file (iso) and select the downloaded .iso file.  Store the virtual disk as one file.  The default 20GB should be big enough for a test system.  Click the Customize Hardware... button when you get to the settings screen.  Change the memory allocated to the virtual machine to at least 4GB. 6GB (6144 MB) is better on a system with 16GB of physical RAM installed.  Increase the number of processors allocated to the virtual machine to at least 2.  These hardware options can be changed each time the virtual machine is powered on.  When the virtual machine powers on, choose Download VMware Tools for Linux.  The VMware window can be resized once it is started up.