Installing VMWare Tools on Ubuntu

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You’ve installed Ubuntu within a VMWare ESXi environment – How do you install the tools?

Hi All

I do this all the time without thinking these days and I remember how it used to fox me when I started using Ubuntu and VMWare together. This is the same process for Ubuntu 10,11 and 12; I don’t believe it’s changed.

1. Make sure your Ubuntu machine is booted up
2. From the VMWare vSphere/ESXi Client right click on your VM, > “Guest”, > “Install/Upgrade VMWare Tools”
3. Using the console, within VMWare log into your newly created Ubuntu system
4. In the background ESXi will have created these tools as a block device which you need to now mount. I normally do it like so

5. mkdir /mnt/vmwareCD

   mkdir /mnt/vmwarefiles

   mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/vmwareCD

   cp /mnt/vmwareCD/* /mnt/vmwarefiles

   umount /mnt/vmwareCD

6. At this point you have just created a couple of folders, mounted the CD, copied the files from the CD to your other folder and unmounted the CD, leaving a copy of the files in /mnt/vmwarefiles
7. I found that generally you need to have GCC installed to help with the install process and obviously we need to decompress the tar file.

8. apt-get install gcc

   cd /mnt/vmwarefile

   tar zxvf vmware (press tab at this point to complete the filename)

   cd vmware-tools-distrib

9. GCC is installed, the tar file has been extracted and we’ve changed into the directory of the tools install. Now to install it

10. ./vmware-install.pl

11. At this point there is a whole heap of questions to answer. Just keep your eyes open for an errors and make sure it finds everything it wants to. For example, if it moans about not being able to find the path to the GCC executable you’ve probably forgotten to install it. If it wants anything else, quit the install, install that component, and start again with the “./vmware-install.pl”. Just press enter a lot accepting the defaults.

[notice]You will be prompted about installing a sync function which is in an experimental phase. It defaults to no and I tend to agree NOT to install it[/notice]

1. Upon completion you’re done
2. If you want to check this for sure, click on the “Summary” tab of your VM. You should see it showing the version number of your tools AND the IP address of your VM. This is proof that you have installed correctly.

• Enjoy

JK