Installing VMware Tools on Debian Etch

VMware don’t provide a packaged version of VMware tools for Debian, but they do provide the source and a script to build and install it. Installation is started in the usual way, but right clicking the virtual machine in Virtual Centre and choosing “Install/Upgrade VMware Tools”. This will mount a CD image containing the required files.

Then, as root, install the kernel headers and tools required to build VMware tools:

apt-get install autoconf automake binutils cpp gcc linux-headers-$(uname -r) make psmisc

Next, mount the installation media and copy the file to /tmp. Obviously the build number of the archive may differ on your system.

mount /dev/cdrom /mnt
cp /mnt/VMwareTools-3.0.2-55869.tar.gz /tmp
umount /mnt

Untar the archive and start the installer. You can accept all the defaults here.

cd /tmp
tar zxf VMwareTools-3.0.2-55869.tar.gz
cd vmware-tools-distrib
./vmware-install.pl

Next, start the configuration program.

vmware-config-tools.pl

Accept all the defaults except for the question: What is the location of the directory of C header files that match your runing kernel? The files will be in /usr/src/linux-headers-version/include - on our system this was /usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.18-6/include.

Finally, remove the existing NIC driver and replace it with the VMware supplied driver. For obvious reasons, this needs to be done from the console.

/etc/init.d/networking stop
rmmod pcnet32
rmmod vmxnet
modprobe vmxnet
/etc/init.d/networking start

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