ESXi

I'm running ESXi 6.0.0 and trying to install VMWare Tools in a Debian 8 guest VM. However, the 64-bit installer does not come up as a valid image and bash refuses to run it, even after setting +x on the file. I'm starting to suspect that the iso image is corrupted somehow. I can get the md5sum of the iso, but I have nothing to compare it to. So 1) where can I go to verify the md5sum and 2) where can I download a known good copy of linux.iso (VMWare Tools for Linux)?

For #2, I've looked here: Index of /45848/tools/releases/latest but they are all distro-specific, and not "generic" Linux, so I'm not sure which one to download. Ubuntu would be closest to Debian, but I'm not sure that it's close enough, nor which specific Ubuntu release would be appropriate.

Use the open-vm-tools package for a Debian installation. It is much easier to install and supported by VMware. See this KB: VMware support for Open VM Tools (2073803) | VMware KB

I think the linux.iso is vendor specific anyway and does not work with Debian (Operating System Specific Packages Home Page). You can create a file in /etc/ so that the installer thinks you are using Ubuntu, but you should really use open-vm-tools.

Thanks. The article you linked to disappointed me at first, because there was no link to an iso and I thought that I'd have to compile the tools from scratch every time I installed Debian in a VM. However, I then thought to look in the Debian repositories and found them. So I ran:

# apt-get install open-vm-tools-desktop

to install the tools. Thanks again.