Hello adams kpewa,
In case you have not gotten ENVI installed yet, here is a link
http://harrisgeospatial.c..._Licensing_Guide.pdf I installed ENVI on my local Ubuntu 16.04 yesterday, David from Harris support and myself had a little trouble but he helped me to get it going. I could not use the command line to launch the licenser, I had to launch the GUI from the command line. I also need to start ENVI from the following location :
john2@mn-mobile05:/usr/local/harris/envi54/bin$ ./envi
This of course depends upon where you unpacked your files. I am not sure of any issues you may have specifically with a virtual machine, if you are still having trouble let me know and I may be able to help.