Possible link between Ubuntu 10.10 upgrade installing open-vm tools:
Long story short: uninstalling the open-vm tools and utterly purging vmware-tools, a reboot and a vmware tools reinstall... And my Ubuntu is running happier than ever...
The open-vm-tools link occurred to me when I noticed that from 10.04 -> 10.10 Ubuntu had magically switched to using -virtual kernels for me instead of just -generic...
Long story long...
After upgrading Ubuntu 10.04 VMs to Ubuntu 10.10 I run into a wall of issues with VMware tools - the guest not fitting issue that others reported solved by uninstalling/reinstalling the vmware xorg server, hgfs not working unless I uninstalled vmware tools at which point it *seemed* to work but I couldn't mount anything... Strange errors in the install log and then, after an attempt to use vmware-tools-upgrader, winding up in a state where I could no-longer install vmware tools.
Several install/uninstall, reboot, uninstall, reboot, reinstall's later, I was ready to tair my hair out.
I started an install which told me it would have to uninstall first, did I want to proceed?
I hit CTRL-C, and the installer/uninstaller went nuts (and backgrounded itself).
At this point: I waited for the background processes to stop and rebooted. I now tried a fresh install, or uninstall, I forget which, and got something new: vmware-tools installer complained that the previous uninstall had failed, and asked if I wanted to remove the database? Yes. Uninstall FAILED!
A quick check of my file system showed me vmware tools completely removed from the system.
Reboot, fresh install of vmware tools... Reboot... Happiness!
Suggested procedure:
1. Uninstall all the open-vm entries you can find in package manager.
2. Reboot.
3. Uninstall vmware-tools.
4. Reboot.
5. Reinstall vmware-tools.
6. Reboot.
7. If guest autofit doesn't work after logging in:
sudo apt-get remove xserver-xorg-video-vmware
sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-vmware
log out & back in
8. If it's still not 100%, try re-starting the vmware tools install, but when it asks if you want to uninstall the previous version, press ctrl-c and wait a few minutes before rebooting, and proceed from step 5.
