Had a hassle the other day with getting VMWare Tools installed on Ubuntu JEOS (the awesome lightweight Linux distribution designed for VMWare setups). I’m running 8.04 JEOS, and basically followed the instructions at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/JeOS, however found that the script wasn’t compatible with my kernel version…

Found a great resource at http://x86virtualization.com/open-source/howto-install-open-vmware-tools-in-linux-kernel-2624.html and followed this path:

Assuming that you’ve got everything happy and installed…

1. In the Virtual Infrastructure Client, choose "install VMWare Tools"
 

2. From the shell/ssh in your Ubuntu VM… mount the virtual CD

sudo mount /media/cdrom0

3. Copy the tools to the tmp directory and uncompress them

sudo cp -a /media/cdrom0/VMwareTools*.gz /tmp/

4. Get some dependencies (you might already have some of these)…

sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r) psmisc libproc-dev libdumbnet-dev libicu38 libicu-dev wget libx11-dev libxext-dev libxinerama-dev libxrandr-dev libxtst-dev libgtk2.0-dev libproc-dev

5. get & configure the new source
(version number will be different - go to http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=204462)

cd /tmp
wget http://internode.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/open-vm-tools/open-vm-tools-2008.07.01-102166.tar.gz
sudo tar -xvzf open-vm-tools/open-vm-tools*.gz
sudo tar -xzvf VMwareTools*.gz
cd open-vm-tools-2008.07.01-102166
./configure --without-x && make

6. go into the linux modules directory & tar up the modules

cd modules/linux
for i in *; do mv ${i} ${i}-only; tar -cf ${i}.tar ${i}-only; done

 … and pop back to the top

cd /tmp

7. move those tarred modules into the folder of the stuff from VMWare

mv -f open-vm-tools-2008.07.01-102166/modules/linux/*.tar vmware-tools-distrib/lib/modules/source/

8. jump into the vmware tools folder… and run the script!

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

9. Happy days…