Install VMware Tools in a Linux Guest

VMware Tools is supported on all Linux guest operating systems that VMware Player supports.

Prerequisites

The virtual machine must be powered on and the guest operating system must be running.

Procedure

On the host, select VM > Install VMware Tools.

If an earlier version of VMware Tools is installed, the menu item is Update VMware Tools. If the current version is already installed, the menu item is Reinstall VMware Tools.

On the guest, log in as root.

If your Linux distribution does not automatically mount CD-ROMs, mount the VMware Tools virtual CD-ROM image.

a If necessary, create the /media/cdrom directory.

         mkdir /media/cdrom

b Mount the CD-ROM drive.
Some Linux distributions use different device names or organize the /dev directory differently. If your CD-ROM drive is not /dev/cdrom or if the mount point for a CD-ROM is not /media/cdrom, modify the command to reflect the conventions that your distribution uses.

mount /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom

Change to a working directory.

For example, cd /tmp

Delete any previous vmware-tools-distrib directory before you install VMware Tools.

The location of this directory depends on where you placed it during the previous installation. Often it is placed in /tmp/vmware-tools-distrib.

Uncompress the installer.

tar zxpf /mnt/cdrom/VMwareTools-<x.x.x>-<yyyy>.tar.gz

The value <x.x.x> is the product version number, and <yyyy> is the build number of the product release.

If necessary, unmount the CD-ROM image.

umount /dev/cdrom

If your Linux distribution automatically mounted the CD-ROM, you do not need to unmount the image.

Run the installer and configure VMware Tools.

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

Usually, the vmware-config-tools.pl configuration file runs after the installer file finishes running. Respond to the prompts and press Enter to accept the default value.

If you are updating VMware Tools, reboot the virtual machine or manually reload the pvscsi, vmxnet, and vmxnet3 Linux kernel modules.

If you reload the modules, networking on the virtual machine is interrupted.

If you manually reloaded the pvscsi, vmxnet, and vmxnet3 Linux kernel modules, enter the following commands to restore the network.

/etc/init.d/network stop
rmmod vmxnet
modprobe vmxnet
/etc/init.d/network start

Log out of the root account.

exit

(Optional) Start your graphical environment.

In an X terminal, start the VMware User process.

vmware-user