Installing VMware Tools from the Command Line with the Tar Installer
The first steps are performed on the host, within Workstation menus:
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Power on the virtual machine.
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After the guest operating system has started, prepare your virtual machine to install VMware Tools.
Choose VM > Install VMware Tools.
The remaining steps take place inside the virtual machine.
- As root (su -), mount the VMware Tools virtual CD-ROM image, change to a working directory (for example, /tmp), uncompress the installer, then unmount the CD-ROM image.
Note: Some Linux distributions automatically mount CD-ROMs. If your distribution uses automounting, do not use the mount and umount commands below. You still must untar the VMware Tools installer to /tmp.
Some Linux distributions use different device names or organize the /dev directory differently. If your CD-ROM drive is not /dev/cdrom or if the mount point for a CD-ROM is not /mnt/cdrom, you must modify the following commands to reflect the conventions used by your distribution.
mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
cd /tmp
Note: If you have a previous installation, delete the previous vmware-distrib directory before installing. The default location of this directory is /tmp/vmware-tools-distrib.
- Untar the VMware Tools tar file:
tar zxpf /mnt/cdrom/VMwareTools-5.0.0-<xxxx>.tar.gz
umount /dev/cdrom
Where <xxxx> is the build/revision number of the VMware Workstation release.
Note: If you attempt to install a tar installation over an rpm installation — or the reverse — the installer detects the previous installation and must convert the installer database format before continuing.
- Run the VMware Tools tar installer:
cd vmware-tools-distrib
./vmware-install.pl
Respond to the configuration questions on the screen. Press Enter to accept the default value.
- Log off of the root account.
exit
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Start X and your graphical environment.
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In an X terminal, launch the VMware Tools background application.
vmware-toolbox &
Note: You may run VMware Tools as root or as a normal user. To shrink virtual disks, you must run VMware Tools as root (su -).