RViz on VMWare 16 not showing robot; no parsing of xml string

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I am using Linorobot2 packages to get an AMR robot up and running. (https://github.com/linorobot/linorobot2). Ubuntu 20.04. VMWare virtual machine. ROS Foxy.

When I run my launch file for description.rviz the RViz software comes up but its just blank axes. Fellow user running the same code shows the robot.

I am getting error "Global Status" "No tf data. Actual Error: Frame [base_footprint] does not exist. In other users working instance their last line of code is "Parsing robot urdf xml string" but I never get that last line.

Any ideas whats causing this hangup? I have seen previous posts of this kind say it is related to directory setup and the launch file looking in the wrong place but I doubled checked it looks good to me.