platform agnostic

If you are building an X-less command-line-only Debian VM, here is what you’ll need to do in order to install VMWare tools so that you can use features like shared folders:

1. Login as root or su.
2. Make sure you have installed the kernel sources and build tools.

apt-get install build-essential

Then run:

apt-get install linux-headers

This will probably give you a message saying: “Package linux-headers is a virtual package provided by:”, followed by a list of available kernel versions. Choose your version by looking it up:

cat /proc/version

or

uname -a

e.g. in my case I chose:

apt-get install linux-headers-2.6-2-amd64

3. Next choose Virtual Machine -> Install VMWare Tools option from the menu (this assumes VMWare Fusion running on Mac but there should be a similar option for VMWare Workstation on Linux and Windows as well).

Now mount the VMWare tools virtual CD:


mount /cdrom
cd /cdrom


Copy VMWare tool source code to /tmp and extract the files (the actual filename will depend on your VMWare version [which the VMWare installer would have reported in case of a mismatch]):

cp VMWareTools-7.9.6-173382.tar.gz /tmp
cd /tmp
tar -xzvf VMWareTools-7.9.6-173382.tar.gz


At this stage you should have a folder called vmware-tools-distrib inside your /tmp folder. Visit this folder and run vmware-install.pl, then follow the on-screen instructions.

cd /tmp/vmware-tools-distrib
./vmware-install.pl


Now at one stage the VMWare tool installer complained about my installed gcc (4.3) version being different from the gcc version that was used to compile my kernel (4.1). Press Ctrl+C to abort the installer at this stage.

Turns out that gcc is merely a symbolic link in /usr/bin folder. Chances are that you’ll have 2 versions of gcc on your system (e.g. Lenny comes with /usr/bin/gcc-4.3 and /usr/bin/gcc-4.1). Just make the symlink point to the version of gcc that was used to compile your kernel:

cd /usr/bin
rm gcc
ln -s /usr/bin/gcc-4.1 gcc


Run vmware-install.pl again and this time things should go through. Restart your VM to finish the installation. You should now be able to see folders shared from the host machine under /mnt/hgfs.

Most of these steps should also apply to Ubuntu.

deepakg configuration, debian, installation, ubuntu linux, virtualization