VMware Fusion 1.1.2 and Ubuntu 8.04/Linux 2.6.24 - Step By Step

[#1]

All credit goes to Mufassa for coming up with the excellent approach to installing VMware Tools on recent Linux distros. I turned it into a step-by-step post on my blog.

In summary:

    • Install any dependencies not shipped with a default Ubuntu install (build-essentials, libgtk2.0-dev, libproc-dev, libdumbnet-dev, xorg-dev)

    • Get the official and open tools, and extract them

    • Compile the open tools

    • Rename and tar them as expected by the official tools

    • Overwrite the official tools archives with the open ones

    • Install them using the official tools install script

First, you’ll need to add several packages, either via Synaptic or apt-get:

    • build-essentials, libgtk2.0-dev, libproc-dev, libdumbnet-dev

    • xorg-dev OR libX11-dev, libxinerama-dev, libxrandr-dev, libxtst-dev

A couple of these are new - libdumbnet and libproc were added as dependencies in the 2008-04-14 version of the tools, so other guides you see likely won’t list these.

Next, download and untar both the open tools and the official ones:

    • Open VM Tools at SourceForge

    • Official Tools are included on an iso that can be mounted via the standard VMware GUI - when mounted you want the tar.gz, not the rpm.

    • Move these somewhere convenient; I recommend the desktop.

    • Use “tar -xvzf file.tar” on each to expand.

Compile the open tools (if you have your dependencies straightened out, this should be fast and easy):

1) cd open-vm-tools-*/

2) ./configure && make

Next, package up the compiled modules:

3) cd modules/linux/

4) for dir in *; do mv $ $-only; tar cf ../../../vmware-tools-distrib/lib/modules/source/$.tar $-only; mv $-only $; done

5) cd ../../../

Finally, install the updated tools:

6) cd vmware-tools-distrib

7) ./vmware-install.pl

A few notes:

    • If you disabled Shared Folders in your VM config, you’ll see a message “Mounting HGFS shares: failed”. Just enable shared folders and reboot.

    • Networking does not seem to properly configure itself when on the default “roaming” mode. I’m honestly not sure what is wrong here, but switching it to manual configuration with DHCP or static IP works fine.

    • While this was all done on Ubuntu 8.04, I expect it will work fine in the future for new Linux versions and distributions.

Enjoy!

This document was generated from the following thread:

[mmoo9154]

diamonds,

Thanks for the post. I really can't believe this problem has existed for so darn long, and that there is no definitive solution on Google, or on the VMware forum. There has got to be a scary amount of lost productivity because of this annoyance.

I followed your step-by-stepguide , which did allow me to compile the openvm sources. Thanks again! (I still can't get the sources provided by VMware in the VMware Tools archive to compile. Gross.)

When I was trying to compile under Ubuntu 8.04, I may have selected the wrong X libs. I didn't see any instructions on how to select (correctly) between xorg-dev and libX11-dev. It was also a little ambiguouse whether you were saying xorg-dev or the four other dev sources (libX11-dev, libxinerama-dev, libxrandr-dev, libxtst-dev). I read it as just the 2 alternatives (xorg-dev or libX11-dev).

I selected libX11-dev the first time. There were only 2 hiccups: The first was that half way through the ./configure it barked about missing ICU.org sources. I added libicu-dev to the long list of sources to install and then ./configure && make sailed without warnings.

The second hiccup was that the "for dir ... done" didn't work. The latest VMware Tools from VMwarer is VMwareTools-1.0.5-80187.tar.gz. When that untars (with tar -xzvf), the vmware-tools-distrib/lib/modules/source/*.tar files come out read-only (444). Tar won't crush them unless you chmod 644 them first.

Then, everything seemed to work, but (after re-booting), the stupid mouse won't release unless I tap Ctl+Alt. According to the Server Console, that indicates VMware Tools isn't running in the guest. I verified /usr/sbin/vmware-guestd is running and vmware-checkvm returns: VMware software version 6 (good)

That's it from the battlefront. I sure hope someone else has more luck than me.

I've just tried to recompile the

[rickcr1205]

Few extra comments:

- I also needed to get libicu-dev

- Thanks for the comment on the permissions issue as well for the old directory modules. (For those new just go to the directory /vmware-tools-distrib/lib/modules/source and type "sudo chmod 644 *"

-My mouse seems to work ok. I had to modify according to another person's post in order to get middle mouse scroll wheel to work. In my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file the device section for the mouse looks like:

Section "InputDevice"

Identifier "Configured Mouse"

Driver "vmmouse"

Option "CorePointer"

Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"

Option "Protocol" "ImPS/2"

Option "Buttons" "5"

Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"

EndSection

- Lastly the writing to the mounted mac drive that I have shared really had me thrown for a long while. I was a bit confused by the instructions above. What I ended up doing (please back up your home directory before trying this) was:

• Log back in with the fail safe terminal (see it under sessions in the boot screen)

• become root "sudo -i"

• add the staff group as 20 "groupadd -g 20 staff"

• Change the userid and groupid of your normal account to match what is on your mac (for me it needed to be 501, and 20.) I use the same username on the vmware ubuntu as the mac so that might matter as well. To change these as root I did:

"usermod -u 501 yourusername"

"usermod -g 20 yourusername"

• (I might have also had to add myself back to my username group as well.. can't remember but if so "useradd -G yourname yourname" (where the first yourname should be the name of a group ubuntu set up for you by default when you first installed ubuntu.)

Someone please correct me if I did something really stupid above. It seems to work now allowing me to write fine to the mac mounted volume. I was a bit weary of using uid 501 and a group 20... hopefully I didn't clobber something important. I'm pretty new to Linux so take the above with a grain of salt.