How to Install VMware Tools on Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 under VMware Fusion

by Peter Cooper on April 26, 2008

Ubuntu Hardy under VMware Fusion

The latest version of Ubuntu (8.04 a.k.a. Ubuntu Hardy - the world's most popular Linux distribution) came out yesterday on April 24th. I downloaded it right away to play with on VMware Fusion, my Mac virtualization tool of choice (though I've now been told this works in VMware Workstation and VMware Player on the PC too!). It worked pretty well out of the box, with even seamless mouse support working right away, but I needed, of course, to install VMware Tools too, as any good VMware user would do. From there, things turned sour, and I was bombarded with error messages similar to:

In file included from /tmp/vmware-config8/vmblock-only/linux/os.h:35,
from /tmp/vmware-config8/vmblock-only/linux/block.c:26:
/tmp/vmware-config8/vmblock-only/./include/compat_wait.h:78: error: conflicting types for ‘poll_initwait’
include/linux/poll.h:65: error: previous declaration of ‘poll_initwait’ was here
In file included from /tmp/vmware-config8/vmblock-only/linux/vmblockInt.h:40,
from /tmp/vmware-config8/vmblock-only/linux/block.c:29:
/tmp/vmware-config8/vmblock-only/./include/vm_basic_types.h:184: error: conflicting types for ‘uintptr_t’
include/linux/types.h:40: error: previous declaration of ‘uintptr_t’ was here
make[2]: *** [/tmp/vmware-config8/vmblock-only/linux/block.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [_module_/tmp/vmware-config8/vmblock-only] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.24-16-generic'
make: *** [vmblock.ko] Error 2
make: Leaving directory `/tmp/vmware-config8/vmblock-only'
Unable to build the vmblock module.

After banging my head against the wall for a while, trying a "vmware-any-any" patch that didn't quite do the trick, and scouring the VMWare Fusion and Ubuntu Forums, I eventually came across a link to a page that described how to solve the problem. The credit for this solution rests entirely on the guy who wrote that page and a guy called Mufassa who posted a shorter explanation to the VMware Fusion forums.

I wanted to write this up into a proper blog post though for two reasons. Firstly, I wanted to show how to fix the problem in a more, direct line by line way (just in case you're a novice or would rather follow some command line instructions). Secondly, I know posts on this blog appear in Google very quickly, so I want people Googling for "vmware fusion" and "ubuntu hardy" (like I was earlier) to find this page and have their problem solved! So, credit to those other guys, but..

Steps To Getting VMware Tools installed on Ubuntu Hardy under VMware Fusion:

Use the "Install VMware Tools" option in VMWare Fusion, and drag the .tar file (not the RPM!) to the Ubuntu desktop.

Open a Terminal (Applications menu -> Accessories -> Terminal). We'll do all the work from the Terminal. First, we need to install some dependencies:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libgtk2.0-dev
sudo apt-get install libproc-dev libdumbnet-dev xorg-dev
cd Desktop/

wget http://mesh.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/open-vm-tools/open-vm-tools-2008.04.14-87182.tar.gz

Next, we need to unpack the tar files we have at hand:

tar xzvf VMware*.gz
tar xzvf open-vm-tools*.gz

Next, we'll build the open-vm-tools:

cd open-vm-tools-2008.04.14-87182/
./configure && make
cd modules/linux/

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:

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/

Now we can run the regular VMware tools installer:

cd vmware-tools-distrib/
sudo ./vmware-install.pl

Once this is done, the best tactic is to restart Ubuntu entirely. Once you boot back up, things should seem a bit smoother. The resolution of the VM will stick to the size of the VM, etc, and you can now drag files directly into Ubuntu Hardy from your Mac desktop!

Note: A few of the lines of code you need to use above are single lines of code but spread over multiple lines on your screen when viewing this blog. Either make your browser wider, or copy and paste them into a text editor before continuing.

{ 20 trackbacks }

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{ 171 comments }

1 shailesh August 29, 2008 at 6:42 am

Thanks a bunch, this worked perfectly with Ubuntu LTS server 8.04.1 and Fusion 1.1.3

2 morgan September 3, 2008 at 8:34 pm

thank you very much, it work fine!

3 Goran Web September 5, 2008 at 10:37 am

You are a life saver this is exactly what I was looking for info on. Digg it. Thanks

4 Gino M. September 6, 2008 at 9:57 pm

God bless.. worked for me - Vista SP1 host with Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04.1 guest in VMWare Server 1.0.7 on Toshiba notebook w/Core Duo 2.4 GHz 2GB RAM.

5 Ted September 11, 2008 at 9:28 pm

It worked great, thanks!

6 Philip September 15, 2008 at 2:27 pm

In order to get a successful build following this technique on Fedora 9, used a later version of open-vm-tools-2008.09.03-114782 from suurceforge.net and had to install the following RPMS and build with

./configure --without-procps && make

uriparser-0.7.1-1.fc9.i386
uriparser-devel-0.7.1-1.fc9.i386
procinfo-18-23.fc9.i386
libdnet-1.12-3.fc9.i386
libdnet-devel-1.12-3.fc9.i386
libdnet-progs-1.12-3.fc9.i386
libicu-devel-3.8.1-7.fc9.i386
icu-3.8.1-7.fc9.i386

7 raymond September 23, 2008 at 11:34 am

Please help,
How can I install vmware-tools when I have no X on my ubuntu server ?

My problem is: When I ask vmware workstation to install the vmware-tools I don't get the tar file containing the vmware tools. Can I somehow dowload this tar manually ?

8 darkan9el September 27, 2008 at 6:38 pm

Hi all trying this and up until the last bit everything goes as it should, i.e. after typing this command: sudo ./vmware-install.pl It asks me which directory to install to [usr/bin]?

er what do I do?

9 poison October 5, 2008 at 6:28 pm

thanks, worked fine with kubuntu-kde4-8.04-desktop-i386.iso and VMware 6.5.

10 DC October 16, 2008 at 9:26 am

I run configure under vmware-tools, but it always encounters a error: checking for uriFreeQueryListA in -luriparser... no
configure: error: uriparser library not found or is too old. Please configure without Unity (using --disable-unity) or install the liburiparser devel package.

I did installed libuiriparser-dev and found its library in /usr/lib and its header files in /usr/include

So I used the command: CFLAGS="-I /usr/lib/" CPPFLAGS="-I /usr/lib" LDFLAGS="-L /usr/lib/" ./configure

But it doesn't work yet. I googled a lot but no answer can be found.

Help~~~~~ Help~~~~~ Help~~~~~

11 DC October 16, 2008 at 9:30 am

by the way, my environment:
Ubuntu 8.04 hardy
Open VMware Tools 20080913
Uriparser 0.7.2
AMD 64 with 2 processors.

12 apa October 24, 2008 at 11:33 am

Thanks for the guide! However I had one problem: I couldn't get the shared folders to work. The reason was that the VMWare Tools installer did not copy mount.vmhgfs to /sbin. I copied it manually from open-vm-tools-2008.10.10-123053/hgfsmounter/mount.vmhgfs and added the following line to the /etc/fstab:
.host:/ /mnt/hgfs vmhgfs defaults,ttl=5 00

It seems that the folder sharing required this mount utility.

13 jason October 24, 2008 at 2:33 pm

thank you solution!

14 Chris October 27, 2008 at 6:22 pm

This thread helped a lot. It shows the missing lib components.

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-917800.html

15 Shea October 31, 2008 at 6:09 pm

This works well for getting 8.10 running under VMWare Workstation 6, too. Thanks for the work!

16 Mitra November 4, 2008 at 8:45 am

There is no need for x-org libs. You can:
12 tar -xzvf open-vm-tools-2008.04.14-87182.tar.gz
13 cd open-vm-tools-2008.04.14-87182/
14 ./configure --without-x
15 make modules

17 Marc November 20, 2008 at 12:22 am

I have Ubuntu 8.10 Server JeOS 64-bit on ESXi 3.5.0, 110271. I installed VMware Tools using some of these tools, here is my how-to guide:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=987631

Also the last thing that I haven't figured out is that when I turn on Paravirtualization in ESXi for this VM I get the message "This kernel requires an x86-64 CPU, but only detected an i686 CPU." I did turn on VT on the bios of the host machine. Can anybody help ?

18 Newbie2linux January 19, 2009 at 6:40 pm

Hi,

Followed the installation steps here and in fairness they're very good however am stuck at the following stage. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

"What is the location of the directory of C header files that match your running
kernel? [/usr/src/linux/include]"

Error message:-

"The path "/usr/src/linux/include" is not an existing directory"

Thank you.

P.S. Trying to install WMWare Tools using Ubuntu 8.10.
P.P.S. Am frustrated that WMWare do not make installing WMWare Tools reasonably straight forward this is after all paid-for software as opposed to open source.

19 koos42 February 3, 2009 at 2:05 am

I too am having a problem with my liburiparser being found to be out of date. I've installed the dev package on Ubuntu, however apt-cache show says that it is still at version 0.6.something.

Is there any way around this? I would like to use unity and this is required for unity to work.

20 Jongsoo February 4, 2009 at 8:21 am

guestInfoPosix.c: In function ‘ReadInterfaceDetails’:
guestInfoPosix.c:204: error: format not a string literal and no format arguments
make[2]: *** [guestInfoPosix.o] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/mobonie/Download/open-vm-tools-2008.04.14-87182/lib/guestInfo'
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/mobonie/Download/open-vm-tools-2008.04.14-87182/lib'
make: *** [all-recursive] Error 1

Is there any soulution for this? thanks any way.

21 max February 23, 2009 at 6:40 pm

help/....trying to install tools in ubuntu 8.10 foloowed coopers steps and so far it is taking everything but i dont have a clue how to tar up something...i dont know that terminology i apologize for my ignorance i am new to linyx can someone please help me understand theses last two procedures....thanks

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