How To Install VMware Tools on Ubuntu Guests

Installing VMware Tools on virtualized guests gives you a much more enjoyable experience within your virtual environment. Screen resolution, mouse behaviour, etc will be improved for your virtual sessions after installing these additional tools. Installing these tools within Ubuntu 8.04 virtualized guests is fairly simple, just follow along below.

Installing VMware Tools

The first requirement, of course, is that you have Ubuntu 8.04 installed within VMware Server and that Ubuntu 8.04 is running.

Once you’ve got your Ubuntu 8.04 guest logged in, navigate to the “VM” menu option (File, Edit, View… VM) and select “Install VMware Tools”. This will notify you once again that your guest must be logged in. If that is the case, click “Install”.

note: The next step in the process may be simpler if you make sure any other CD images are unmounted before continuing.

This part of the process mounts a virtual CD image with the VMware Tools contained on it. To find these tools for installation navigate to Places > Computer > CD Drive. You should find these two files listed there:

VMwareTools-*.rpm
VMwareTools-.tar.gz


For Ubuntu guest installations we’ll want to use the .tar.gz file. Now we have access to the needed file, the next part of the process is opening the archive and installing the tools.

Below I’ve put together a copy-paste list of commands you should be able to use to unpack and setup VMware Tools on your Ubuntu 8.04 guest. All of these commands happen within the Ubuntu 8.04 Guest machine:

sudo aptitude install build-essential linux-headers-generic
cp /media/cdrom/VMwareTools-*.tar.gz /tmp/
cd /tmp/
tar xf VMwareTools-*.tar.gz
cd vmware-tools-distrib/
sudo ./vmware-install.pl


You should be able to safely select the defaults for most of the questions. You might want to pay attention at the step where it asks for your preferred available resolution and set that properly. For the new VMware Tools to be available once this process is done you’ll need to reboot your Ubuntu 8.04 guest. Enjoy.

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