Anyway to have Fusion/VMware tool put 'system' attributes to the VMtool shared folders?

[nicecab]

<Environment>

VMware Fusion Pro 11.5 under MacOS 10.15.6 (Catalina)

<background>

I am running a Windows VM on top of Fusion Pro and sharing Desktop and other folders through VMware tool.

Everything works fine and I like the environment pretty much EXCEPT one thing.   That is you cannot change icons for these shared folders!!

If I had just a couple of folders I would not care but I  have a bunch of folders on my desktop which are  based on categories and I want to have quick access to the files in a folder of the interest.

In order to achieve the above objective, changing icons of folders were quite effective BEFORE I migrate the enviroment to the VM.

After the migration, I had realized the fact that you cannot change the icons for those shared folders and I got quite disappointed.

I have done a quite bit search in hoping there could be a way to do this and I have concluded that this is something we need to at the Fusion and VMware tool side and NOT at the Windows guest.

Per my reasearch,  the icon information for a folder in Windows OS is decribed in the 'desktop.ini' file which is created/placed in the very folder, and in order for Windows to show the icon based on the description there, the desktop.ini file must have the system attribute.   However those shared folders do not have the system attribute -- or I should say Fusion/VMware tools does not seem to emulate/tell Windows about this attribute) therefore Windows must be unable to do anything with icons for those shared folders.

As a matter of fact, you CAN change the folder icons for SMB shared folders if you have 'store dos attributes = yes'  setting in samba's configuration.

...my apologies for the long explanation above but if there is a setting at  Fusion/VMware tools to have system attributes for shared folders (for Windows guest), I want to know how to set.

If there is no way to do this, I want the developers to implement the capability (just like like samba mentioned above)

Many thanks in advance!

[wila]

Hi,

While what you are asking might not work that way there's an easy workaround.

Right click on the folder you want to add an icon for.

Select "Send To" -> "Desktop create shortcut"

That will create a shortcut for the folder you need on your desktop.

You can set the icon for the shortcut in the usual way.

Enjoy!

--

Wil

[nicecab]

Thank you for your suggestion!

Yes that will certainly workaround the inconvenience and I would do this if there is definitely no way to do what I am looking for..

[wila]

Hi,

I'm not aware of another way and I did try to do this before I came up with the shortcut approach.

So unless the developer of the shared folders features steve goddard drops in and tells you some secret incantation for getting this to work, the workaround is it I'm afraid.

--

Wil

[steve_goddard]

Hi Wil and all,

Thanks for bringing this to my attention.

As you are running this on Fusion and the system attribute is really only supported attribute Windows hosts and VMs.

Currently, we have not mapped the system attribute across to host files when on Linux or Apple hosts.

Having said that we can do that given a reason such as the one here.

I will file an internal bug to see if we can get someone to add support for this. It would not be that hard to do as we currently

support the HIDDEN attribute.

The current suggested workaround is likely to be the best option currently.

FYI to add I am not and have not been working on this feature for a long time now. I do jump in here and will answer questions when I can.

Thanks

Steve

[wila]

Thanks Steve for the extra information and for filing the internal bug report.

FYI to add I am not and have not been working on this feature for a long time now. I do jump in here and will answer questions when I can.

I will keep that in mind next time a user bumps into a shared folder issue, thanks again.

--

Wil