This post was most recently updated on December 11th, 2018
The first thing that is important is that you will need to know is that you have to install the compilation utilities, which aren’t installed by default. Run these commands to get you started:
sudo apt-get install build-essential
sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`
The first command installs gcc and all the compiler utilities. The second command installs the header files for your currently running kernel. Notice that the ` is the one next to the 1 key on your keyboard.
Now you’ll want to navigate to the VM \ Install VMware Tools menu:
Then mount the cdrom (first locate the cdrom in dev):
sudo mkdir /media/cdrom
sudo mount /dev/scd0 /media/cdrom
This will mount the vmware tools in Ubuntu so that you can begin the install. To install the tools, run the following commands:
cp /cdrom/*.gz /tmp/
cd /tmp
tar xvzf VM*.gz
cd vmware*
sudo ./vmware-install.pl
Select all of the defaults. It will prompt you that you need to compile the module for your system. Select yes and continue.
Finally run these commands:
/etc/init.d/networking stop
rmmod pcnet32
rmmod vmxnet
modprobe vmxnet
/etc/init.d/networking start
after updating ESX4i the vmware tools were outdated, so had to reinstall vmware tools, this did not work automatically so had to come up with a solution:
The following prompt appeared during the execution of VMware Tools install script vmware-config-tools.pl (commando: /usr/bin/vmware-config-tools.pl):
What is the location of the directory of c header files that match your running kernel /usr/src/linux/include
The default value was not being accepted by the script. I was running Ubuntu 8.10 as the guest OS, but other Ubuntu distributions might need the same treatment. The issue is that the C source code headers that correspond to your running Linux kernel are not installed. The VMware Tools installation needs to compile some modules during the installation, based upon your running kernel. It needs the kernel source headers in order to do this.
SOLUTION:
1) Figure out what your kernel version is
uname -a
On mine, I got something like this:
Linux dnm-ws01 2.6.24-28-generic #1 SMP Wed Nov 24 09:30:14 UTC 2010 i686 GNU/Linux
The kernel version is the “2.6.24-28-generric” part.
2) Install the headers for your kernel
sudo apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.24-28-generic
Use the apt-get command to obtain and install the headers for your kernel. Your command will depend upon what you got from step #1 above. For mine it was:
sudo apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.24-28-generic
3) Run the vmware-config-tools.pl script again
Now you can re-run the configuration script OR allow it to continue if your did step #1 and #2 above in a separate terminal session and the script is still waiting for a response. This time, tell it where the headers are located. For me, it was:
/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.24-28-generic/include
That’s it! Now the rest of the script should execute, build and install each module.
Some notes which need to be included in this page:
configure VMWARE TOOLS
/usr/bin/vmware-config-tools.pl
remove old cdrom dingetjes
sudo rmdir /media/cdrom