Install VMware tools to Ubuntu VM
In order to support high display resolution and file sharing in Ubuntu VM, VMware tools should be
installed. The installation processes are listed as following, step by step, most of which are command line
operations.
-> Use the “Install VMware Tools” option in VMware menu bar, and drag the .tar file (not the RPM!) to
the Ubuntu desktop.
-> Open a Terminal (Applications menu -> Accessories -> Terminal). We’ll do all the work from the
Terminal. First, we need to install some dependencies:
sudo apt-get install build-essential libgtk2.0-dev
sudo apt-get install libproc-dev libdumbnet-dev xorg-dev
cd Desktop/
wget http://mesh.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/open-vm-tools/open-vm-tools-2008.04.14-87182.tar.gz
-> Next, we need to unpack the tar files we have at hand:
tar xzvf VMware*.gz
tar xzvf open-vm-tools*.gz
-> Next, we’ll build the open-vm-tools:
cd open-vm-tools-2008.04.14-87182/
./configure && make
cd modules/linux/
-> In the modules/linux folder we have the vmblock, vmhgfs, vmmemctl, vmsync and vmxnet modules
that we need to tar up and place into the official VMware tools tarball:
for i in *; do mv ${i} ${i}-only; tar -cf ${i}.tar ${i}-only; done
cd ../../..
mv -f open-vm-tools-2008.04.14-87182/modules/linux/*.tar vmware-tools-distrib/lib/modules/source/
-> Now we can run the regular VMware tools installer:
cd vmware-tools-distrib/
sudo ./vmware-install.pl
-> Once this is done, the best tactic is to restart Ubuntu entirely.
Once you boot back up, things should seem a bit smoother. The resolution of the VM will stick to the
size of the VM, etc, and you can now drag files directly into Ubuntu from host’s (such as MS Windows)
desktop!
Author: Qian Lin