How To: Install vmware-tools in Ubuntu 6.06 LTS

This is the procedure I used for installing VMware-tools in Ubuntu 6.06 from the command line. I'm not even sure exactly what benefit the tools are providing to a 6.06 server that doesn't use X at all, but I decided to install the tools anyway.

This assumes that you have already installed Ubuntu 6.06 into a VM and is running. It is possible that this procedure will work with another Linux distribution, however the package manager commands will probably be different. I would imagine the rest of the procedure would be quite similar though. This is also tailored to VMware Server 2.0 Beta, although I imagine it would work with any other version as well.

On the summary page for the VM click install tools, this will have your VM point to the iso file that contains the tools.

Then open up the console. I found it necessary to mount the cdrom manually ...

sudo mount /media/cdrom0/ -o unhide

If you do:

cd /cdrom

ls

You should see two files there:

VMwareTools-e.x.p-63231.i386.rpm
VMwareTools-e.x.p-63231.i386.tar.gz

You have successfully mounted the tools iso.

Now, cd to /tmp ....

cd /tmp

And, extract VMwareTools*.tar.gz

sudo tar xvf /cdrom/VMwareTools*.tar.gz

(list of files) ....

Okay, now we can try to install the tools ...

cd vm*

sudo ./vmware-install.pl

Accept the defaults, unless you have a reason not to.

(note to myself after blindly accepting the defaults: What is the directory that contains the init directories? (/etc), , what is the directory that contains the init scripts .... It may be a good idea to make sure the defaults are correct actually for Ubuntu ... but thats for another day.)

And then the first problem pops up, you'll most likely run into it as well on a new install of Ubuntu 6.06. After the script asks you if you would like to run vmware-config-tools.pl, and you say yes, it will inform you that none of the vmmemctl modules are suitable for your running kernel, and ask you if you want to build the vmmemctl module for the system. Go ahead and say yes.

Alright, now it says setup is unable to find the "make" program on your machine blah blah blah...

[Ctrl+C] out of the script ...

You need to install some stuff for this to work obviously, to save you some time ... You need to install the packages build-essentails, and the Linux header files for your kernel.

sudo apt-get install build-essential

uname -r

sudo apt-get install linux-header-"what uname -r printed out"

A side note, when I ran apt-get install linux-header-* apt-get was unable to locate the files. Sometimes its necessary to run "apt-get update" ... this made apt-get be able to locate the files.

Alright, now that we have the headers and build essentials installed, we should be able to complete the tools setup.

Start vmware-install.pl

sudo ./vmware-install.pl

Accept defaults again ....

Say yes and let it build you a version of whatever it needs ....

The last option, Virtual Machine Communication Interface (VMCI) service, says that its experimental and defaults to no, I left it that way.

My vmhgfs failed to mount, which I think has to do with shared folders, and wasn't too big a concern for me, but it would be interesting to see why. Everything else appears to work fine.

And thats all there is to installing vmware-tools in Linux, almost as easy as Windows...