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I had installed the newest VMware server on Windows 7. I am running a VM with the newest Ubuntu 11.04. The version of VMware Remote Console is 2.5.0 build-122581 (I guess it's the newest at the moment of writing).

I am trying to install the VMware tools on my Ubuntu VM. On the previous version of VM there was a simple menu item, called "install vmware tools" that did all the job. On the current version (that comes with a web interface for some reason) the "install vmware tools" only causes some directory to be mounted from inside the Ubuntu. The mounted directory has 2 files: rpm and tar.gz. I wanted to install the rpm, so that the package manager will recognize the installation and everything will be kinda smooth and well-formed. However, not sure that rpm suits Ubuntu, but deb (there is no file like this).

In short, is tar.gz my only option or I can still install rpm in some way?

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2 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

RPM is for Red-Hat like package management, and therefore not suitable for Ubuntu. Just untar the .tar.gz file.

tar xvf VMwareTools*.tar.gz

and then see the corresponding Readme- or Installation-files for help. If I'm not completely wrong, there is an installer script. Just cd to the newly extracted directory and run the installer script with root permissions:

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

Finally, open the vmware-toolbox:

sudo vmware-toolbox

This is what I gathered from my memory and the Ubuntu documentation, so if they haven't changed anything, it should work like this.

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Correct in general (and perfectly answers the question). however, installing took me to a different domain of problems, but that's (as I've said) a different subject. Thanks! – BreakPhreak Jun 13 '11 at 11:45
you can most certainly use rpm (via Alien) on Debian-based distros such as Ubuntu, though they're not native, and .debs are better :) – warren Jun 21 '11 at 13:42
@warren Yeah, I've used alien before, but I didn't want to go into the troubles of that ;) – slhck♦ Jun 21 '11 at 15:06
up vote 1 down vote

Its not enough to run the install you have to also run /usr/bin$ sudo ./vmware-config-tools.pl to get tools support compiled into the kernel.

Let us know how it goes and if your vmware tools service starts.

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since then at the end of the day, our sysadmin took control and solved it by a different procedure. I think it was: help.ubuntu.com/community/VMware/Tools. Still the answer above appears valid to me, since my initial intention was to install it in a different way, but unzipping etc was the only option. Thanks a lot for your valuable update. – BreakPhreak Jun 23 '11 at 7:37

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