If you work much with virtual machines, you know how important installing VMware Tools can be. Even without the graphical interface of Linux (called X11), there are a number of important features that installing VMware Tools offers you and you really shouldn’t skip it. I’ve struggled with installing VMware Tools on Ubuntu Linux in the past, and I hope you find this guide helpful in making it even quicker and easier. It seems newer versions of Ubuntu and VMware Tools broke my previous instructions. Luck for us, VMware and Ubuntu contributors have made the process easier than it was in the past.

Now for a little back story: VMware has released the source code for VMware Tools as an open source project called open-vm-tools located at Sourceforge. By itself, this isn’t helpful because open-vm-tools does not include an installer and therefore you would need to run shell scripts to merge the working bits of open-vm-tools into the traditional VMware Tools installer. Let’s all be glad we can avoid that mess.

Contributors of Ubuntu have taken open-vm-tools and created a installable package for Ubuntu, and included it in the standard software repositories so you can install it easily. This means upgrades should be much easier in the future, and these directions should hopefully continue to work into the future. Let’s get down to it.

Notes:

• I have tested this on Ubuntu 8.10 Server (Intrepid Ibex) but it should work just as well on the Desktop edition. If this doesn’t work for you, try my old instructions.
• This only sets up the basics of VMware Tools for a terminal install of Ubuntu, like Server edition. If you want the copy/paste integration and other goodies available for Ubuntu with a graphical interface, you need to install an additional software package called open-vm-toolbox in step 3. I’m not sure what else is required, please leave a comment if you figure it out.
• You must execute all of these commands either using sudo or otherwise with root-level access. This means putting sudo in front of the commands, or creating a root terminal with sudo bash.

1. Let’s get your virtual machine ready:

I’ll assume you just finished installing Ubuntu and we need to install all the updated versions of included software.

apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade

2. Reboot:

Since we probably just upgraded the Linux kernel, let’s reboot now to make sure we’re booted from the newest kernel.

reboot

3. Install the Ubuntu package for open-vm-tools:

Log back in and make sure you continue running these commands as root or using sudo.

apt-get install open-vm-tools

4. Bring back the network connection so we can continue:

At this point, the installation of the package killed your network connection for no good reason and we need it to continue. I hope you weren’t using SSH yet! Let’s bring the connection back up so we can keep working.

modprobe pcnet32
/etc/init.d/networking restart

5. Build and install the kernel modules:

The current version of the Ubuntu open-vm-tools package installs files in the right spots, but it doesn’t actually build the various kernel modules (drivers) necessary for VMware Tools to actually work. Let’s build them now.

Note: If the second command fails take a look at my comment below for a fix.

module-assistant prepare open-vm
module-assistant auto-install open-vm

6. Reconfigure and rebuild initramfs:

I’m a little sketchy on the details here, but from what I’ve learned, the boot process doesn’t have access to the VMware accelerated NIC (vmxnet) kernel module at boot time and it fails to load. So if we include it inside initramfs, it will have access to the vmxnet module, and we will get a network connection at bootup. Very handy!

echo vmxnet >> /etc/initramfs-tools/modules
update-initramfs -u

7. Reboot for the last time:

reboot

8. Dance!

At this point everything should be great! You have all the features of VMware Tools, and didn’t pull your hair out in the process! Win-win! You can do a little dance, nobody is watching!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 9th, 2009 at 8:46 pm and is filed under Linux, Virtualization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.