Open VMware Tools, Installation Instructions Step by Step

What are VMware Tools?

They are a collection of software and drivers which enhance and improve the virtualization experience for the guest operating system. They include shared folders, heartbeat drivers, enhanced network drivers, and mouse and video drivers to allow seemless migration between guest and console operating systems.

Where can I get VMware tools?

Currently there are 2 sources, the first source is with VMware workstation or VMware Server Products (including VMware Server and VMware ESX). If you are running VMware player the expectation is that you are only going to be using prebuilt Virtual Machines which have the tools previously loaded.

What are Open VMware Tools (open-vm-tools)?

The Open Virtual Machine Tools (open-vm-tools) are the open source implementation of VMware Tools. They are a set of guest operating system virtualization components that enhance performance and user experience of virtual machines. As virtualization technology rapidly becomes mainstream, each virtualization solution provider implements their own set of tools and utilities to supplement the guest virtual machine. However, most of the implementations are proprietary and are tied to a specific virtualization platform. (About Open-VM-Tools)

Where can I get Open-VM-Tools?

The open tools are available currently in the source format only currently. For a limited time they where available as part of the Ubuntu repository, but due to their alpha stages they have been removed. More info about the removal can be found here at launchpad bug # 217254 To dowload a copy of the source files or learn more about the project visit the open-vm-tools sourceforge page.

Keep reading to see step by step installation instructions

How do I install Open-VM-Tools in JeOS?

Step 1. Mount current VMware Tools cd in linux. Open the menu “VM -> Install VMware Tools”. This will set the cdrom drive to a linux tools iso. Make sure the system is powered on and ready to install the software. Click ok to continue.

Step 2. Mount the CD, if needed.
mount /media/cdrom0

Step 3. Copy the tar file to your tmp directory.
cd /media/cdrom0
cp VMwareTools-1.0.*.tar.gz /tmp

Step 4. Get the most recent copy of Open-VM-Tools
cd /tmp
wget http://mesh.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/open-vm-tools/open-vm-tools-2008.04.14-87182.tar.gz

Step 5. Unpack all the VMware tools we have in the tmp directory
tar xzvf VMware*.gz
tar xzvf open-vm-tools*.gz

Step 6. Build the Open-VM-Tools
Note this does require the linux build tools which are not installed by default with JeOS. So you may need to also install those. This is easily done with the following command:
sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r)
Now build the Open-VM-Tools
cd open-vm-tools-2008.04.14-87182/
./configure && make
cd modules/linux/


Step 7. Time for some fancy command line copy and paste:
In the modules/linux folder we have the vmblock, vmhgfs, vmmemctl, vmsync and vmxnet modules that we need to tar up and place into the official VMware tools tarball: See related articles for source of this information
for i in *; do mv ${i} ${i}-only; tar -cf ${i}.tar ${i}-only; done
cd ../../..
mv -f open-vm-tools-2008.04.14-87182/modules/linux/*.tar vmware-tools-distrib/lib/modules/source/


Step 8. Run the regular VMware Tools Install
For more instructions on this step it is best to search google for the errors you may be having.
cd vmware-tools-distrib/
sudo ./vmware-install.pl


Step 9. Reboot Linux and enjoy the VMware Tools on an 2.6.24 Kernel System.

If you need to do this mulitple times it would be smart to retar the vmware-tools-distrib folder and put it on a local file server. Even though part of these have been released as open source, since you are using the open source portion to “patch” the current closed source release I’m not legally allowed to distribute the patched version as open source. But internally you should be fine, as it only really does anything when you are running VMware virtualization software.

Related Articles and References:
How to Install VMware Tools on Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 under VMware Fusion

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