Installing VMWare Tools on Ubuntu Guest Servers

After hunting around on the web for a while, I couldn't find anyone who answered this in a way that people could run step-by-step, so I hope this helps other people in the future.

I used Ubuntu 8.04.2 LTS for the purposes of this example, but a similar, if not identical set of commands should work for any version of Ubuntu Server.

First, you'll need to have installed VMWare on Windows or a UNIX server and have your Ubuntu Guest running, then you can go to "VM / Install VMWare Tools".

Your first problem, because you're not running a desktop system in your guest -- the CDROM is not automounted for you, so you'll need to do:

mount /media/cdrom

Next, you'll need to copy the .tar.gz file to a place on the installation that has write access, like /tmp:

cp /media/cdrom/VMwareTools-*.tar.gz /tmp/

Next, extract the file:

tar zvxf VMwareTools-*.tar.gz

Change to the directory:

cd /tmp/vmware-tools-distrib/

Now, before we actually run the installer, Ubuntu Server needs some packages installed so the new kernel modules can be built successfully.

apt-get -f install build-essential linux-headers-server linux-server

Once they've been successfully installed, you can run:

sudo perl vmware-install.pl

Most of the defaults are fine, when you are asked for "the location of the C header files for your running kernel" you'll need to answer with the include directory from the kernel you are currently running -- from the looks of things, this trips people up sometimes.

(Ubuntu doesn't ship with a /usr/src/linux directory, so if you press [ENTER] here, you'll get a "Directory not found" message and asked to re-enter the location)

As of the time of writing, the kernel is 2.6.24-23-server, so your location would be:

/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.24-23-server/include

Once you've done that, the configuration routine will continue through to the end normally and you can reboot your guest OS in order for the changes to take effect.