Since a little while Debian 5.0 Lenny was released. Like ever mostly everything works perfekt – excepting the installation of VMware Tools in an VMware Workstation or ESX enviroment.
The problem is simple: the VMware Tools from ESX 3.5 and/or Workstation 6 are too old, they need an get_info method for being compiled. But this method was remove in Kernel 2.6.26!
But there is a simple solution: you take the newer VMware Tools from the VMware Server 2 package. For this, you need to download the VMware Server 2 package and extract the linux.iso under vmware-server-distrib/lib/isoimages/. The rest of the package can be deleted.
Now you can install the tools:
- Mount the linux.iso and copy the tools from it:
mount -o loop /tmp/linux.iso /mnt/cdrom cp /mnt/cdrom/VMwareTools-2.0.0-122956.tar.gz /tmp tar xvfz VMwareTools-2.0.0-122956.tar.gz
- Depending on your system, you need to install some additional stuff:
aptitude install build-essential autoconf automake linux-headers-`uname -r` - Start the installation of the tools:
aptitude install build-essential autoconf automake linux-headers-`uname -r` -
cd vmware-contrib/ ./vmware-install.pl
- If you get an error message like:
Your kernel was build with “gcc” version “4.1.3″, while you are trying to use “/usr/bin/gcc” version “4.3.2″
Just set your compiler to the right version. Lenny installed as default also the version 4.1 but links also to the newer 4.3. Just set temporarely the new version with
export CC=/usr/bin/gcc-4.1 - The installation should run perfelcy through everything – my installation had a problem with the vmsocks module, but since I don’t need this, I didn’t looked after.
- To finish the installation, you need to reinitialize your network – don’t do this over an ssh console!
/etc/init.d/networking stop rmmod pcnet32 rmmod vmxnet /etc/init.d/networking start
Now you’ve got an running VM with clean installed VMware Tools.