Cannot use or upgrade VMware Tools on an old Linux guest

[vlastovka]

Hello,

I have an older Linux guest that worked flawlessly with the Player (I think version 1 or 2). A year ago I bought Workstation Pro 14 and the Tools in the guest don't work anymore.

I am really disappointed as Workstation cost me a huge amount of money. I tried to upgrade the Tools but it did not work (see the picture).

What is making me upset:

1. The software says I should run vmware-install.pl which does not exist.

2. The shell script tries to write to a mounted CD.

3. The upgrader itself does not work.

And because the Tools stopped working I cannot remember how to set desktop size in my guest OS

I want to keep this system with KDE 3, I don't want to upgrade.

Thanks in advance.

[dariusd]

You need to "use tar to uncompress the installer", as the footnote on the screen somewhat tersely describes, and you will find vmware-installer.pl inside that tarball.

Detailed instructions are available here: Manually Installing VMware Tools on a Linux Virtual Machine​

Hope this helps!

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Darius

[vlastovka]

Ok, I did not know if my mouse worked before, but after running sax2 my mouse buttons don't work anymore. Either they are are ignored completely or my X performs a double click when I depress my left mouse button.

My OS is unusable now apart from command line...

[dariusd]

For some reason, openSUSE thinks there are two separate mice.  I get the same behavior here when I run openSUSE 11.1 x86_64 on Workstation 15.5.1 for Linux.

To fix it, I launched SaX2 (this can still be done with the mouse, despite the double-clicking that goes on elsewhere), then choose Mouse in the left pane.  There will be two tabs tabelled Mouse 1 and Mouse 2.  Find which tab has the mouse named VMware Virtual USB Mouse... here it is Mouse 1 but I guess it could possibly end up as Mouse 2 on some installations.  With the VMware Virtual USB Mouse tab selected, uncheck the Activate This Pointer checkbox.  The other mouse device (VMware Pointer) should be left enabled.  Save the settings and restart X, and your double-clicking problems should be solved.

Let me know how it goes!

--

Darius

[vlastovka]

Sorry I was not able to respond earlier. I have no Tools installed atm. This is what I have done:

• I removed open-vm-tools package provided by my OS (dated 2008)
• I uninstalled vmware-kmp-pae package
• proceeded with instalation of tools bundled with the Workstation.
• vmware-config-tools.pl refuses to accept kernel headers that are in standard /usr/src/linux

Seems I will need to bugfix the script. It probably thinks there is a version mismatch between my running kernel and kernel sources.

[vlastovka]

So many hours of wasted work

I modified the perl script, but it calls some binary that does not even attempt to compile any driver. It just prints "Provided kernel information will not work with the running kernel."

As it is an EXE, it cannot be fixed...

[vlastovka · Accepted solution]

I finally got the Tools working. I had to revert to a GA kernel without any security fix...

So the running kernel version exactly matched kernel's source/headers. And there was a problem in OpenSuse, that kernel and its source package was not dependency linked...

I really believed that Linux kernel version is major.minor.release and that security patches would not break binary compatibility with Linux's drivers.

Shame on Linux's monolithic kernel. Golden OS/2 or Windows device driver API.

The good thing after all this struggle is, that compiled Tools finally work - my KDE's mouse, resizing and graphics acceleration work as they should