Unable to change virtual machine power state: Failed to connect to peer process.

I’ve been struggling with this error message all day and haven’t yet found a resolution. I’ve already checked the usual suspects:

VMware Workstation 5.0.0 build-13124

barik@chronos:/usr/local/lib/vmware/bin$ ls -ld vmware-vmx
-r-sr-xr-x  1 root root 3636940 2005-10-25 22:12 vmware-vmx

But still I’m able to run everything successfully as root, I’m led to believe that there’s some sort of permissions problem somewhere.

This problem also appears under Gentoo, for entirely different reasons, which requires the following solution. After adding yourself to the vmware group:

chmod u+s /opt/vmware/lib/bin/vmware-vmx

Update: Hah, the solution was very anticlimactic. After running strace, it turns out that /var was out of disk space. I really need to learn to check for this situation first, before pulling my hair out.