Debian Tutorials Copy/Paste tutorials for Debian Linux

Installing VMware tools on lenny

This has been tested on Debian lenny running on VMware server 2.0.

Install kernel headers and some tools used to install VMware tools:
apt-get install binutils cpp gcc make psmisc linux-headers-$(uname -r)


Mount the cdrom drive. Make sure you have mounted the VMware tools virtual cd from the host before moving on.
mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/


Extract VMware tools to the tmp directory:
tar -C /tmp -zxvf /mnt/VMwareTools-x.x.x.tar.gz

The filename depends on the host software/OS.

Unmount the virtual cd:
umount /mnt


Lenny is configured to use gcc 4.3 but WMware tools requires gcc 4.1. Both versions of gcc are installed by default so we'll temporarily use 4.1 while building VMware tools:
ln -sf /usr/bin/gcc-4.1 /usr/bin/gcc


Make sure you run the following command from the Console, don't try to run it using SSH because the network will be restarted and the installation will fail.
cd /tmp/vmware-tools-distrib
./vmware-install.pl

Accept the defaults for every question. Make sure you're located inside the vmware-tools-distrib folder when executing the vmware-install.pl script or the installation will fail.

After the build has completed, configure the system to use gcc 4.3 again:
ln -sf /usr/bin/gcc-4.3 /usr/bin/gcc


To finish the installation and start the virtual machine with VMware tools installed, reboot the virtual machine:
reboot