iEntry 10th Anniversary
LinuxHaxor
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MHOpen Virtual Machine Tools with Ubuntu Hardy
VMWare recently released Fusion 2.0 beta for the Mac, which we’re all desperately looking forward to. When you rely on stable software to earn your living, it’s not always a good idea to jump in to the latest beta releases with wild abandon. Unfortunately, the latest stable release (1.1.3) has some known problems with the latest releases of several Linux distros built on newer kernels that came out after the Fusion release. And guest OSes with no VMWare tools are not fun to use.
However, where the nice folks at VMware open sourced their Virtual Machine Tools late last year, the OSS community has been quietly building in compatibility for newer Linux distributions at the Sourceforge hosted openvmtools project. Getting a working vmtools installation into a freshly upgraded Ubuntu 8.04 is a simple matter of rebuilding the right modules against the newer kernel and rolling them up into a tarball where the vmware-install.pl script can find them:
- Delete any broken attempted build directories from the distributed VMwareTools and unpack a fresh tree from the mounted
VMwareToolsdistribution:$ tar zxvf VMwareTools-*z
- If you don’t have them already, install the compilers and headers needed to rebuild the kernel modules:
$ sudo apt-get install build-essentials libproc-dev \ libdumbnet-dev xorg-dev libgtk2.0-dev
- Fetch the latest open-vm-tools sources from sourceforge.
- Unpack and build the modules from open-vm-tools:
$ tar zxvf open-vm-tools*z $ cd open-vm-tools- $ ./configure ... $ make ...
- Now, roll up your newly built modules so that the standard
vmware-install.plscript can find them:$ dest=$(cd ../vmware-tools-distrib/lib/modules/source; pwd) $ rm -f $dest/* $ for dir in vmblock vmhgfs vmmemctl vmsync vmxnet; do \ mv modules/linux/$dir modules/linux/$dir-only; \ tar cf $dest/$dir.tar modules/linux/$dir-only; \ done - Run the
vwware-install.plscript as usual, but without the compilation errors:$ cd ../vmware-tools-distrib $ perl ./vmware-install.pl
As open-vm-tools are developed to keep pace with changes in the Linux kernel, and distro specific kernel patches between stable releases of VMware Fusion (and VMware for Windows and Linux too), this is the easiest way to be sure you’re getting the best possible experience with virtualized Linux.
You can also check out our Seamless Virtualbox installation guide over here.
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If you liked this article, please share it on del.icio.us, StumbleUpon or Digg. I’d appreciate it. :)
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what system requirement does it need.
It seems so easy when you list it out, however execution is poor and failing. Tried several times and different ways, but this seems to be a problem in that not all the libs are available or the incorrect / old packages are being installed. One of the failings of this type of implement I guess. No one is on the same sheet of software when trying to get anything done.
Really frustrating, as I am trying to get Ubuntu to function in a VM, and just simply don’t have the proper or correct tools to get it to happen.
Why is this trend of copy pasting someone else’s material on the rise? And not even a link to the original article. Just copy paste and submit to Digg then lay back and be rich… Not the way to do it.
Just do a google on ‘install vmware tools ubuntu’ and find LOTS of thorough guides on this topic.
@Stefan this is an original article written by Gary V. Vaughan (http://blog.azazil.net/), so I am not sure what you mean by “just copy and paste and submit to Digg”.
Please DO reply and tell us what you mean.
As to the other replies, I will let Gary answer those questions.
@erichansa
I’m not sure what you mean. I wrote this article while installing Linux Mint Elyssa (v5r1) into VMWare Fusion 1.1.3 on my revA Macbook running Leopard 10.5.4. Hope that answers your question?
@DSC
I was working with a pristine Mint Elyssa install iso (which is based off Hardy Heron). If you show me the errors you’re getting, perhaps I’ll be able to identify the packages you’re missing? I have every reason to believe that this should also work when installing to VMware on Linux or Windows, though I didn’t actually try that…
@Stefan Neagu
If only that were the case! I was inspired to write this because when I tried to put a modern Ubuntu based distro into VMware myself last week — all of the guides I googled were hopelessly out of date, or plain wrong in some small details that caused me to waste time trying them, before figuring out and documenting a working recipe for you guys. I hope that some digg success will push this article up the google rankings and help people find it in preference to the half dozen broken guides I fought with along the way….
Cheers,
Gary
I like virtualbox better…
http://www.virtualbox.org/
Note that it’s “build-essential” not “build-essentials”. Please double check your commands character-by-character before we go pasting them into our terminals.
Thanks
Woooooooooo, people actually copy and paste without reading. Don’t blame the man, if you can do better then put your money where your mouth is. Thank Gary!.
I hate Linux (because of the uber fanboiism) but even I’m not so stupid as to think this is the only way to do it. As Balla79 said, the precompiled .deb files already exist. Articles like this don’t do Linux any favors and neither do the people who Digg such utter