Installing VMware Tools in Fedora 11

Bill Giannikos (Home Page)

In this guide we will be going through the process of correctly installing VMware Tools in Fedora 11. This guide assumes you have already installed VMware Workstation, have installed Fedora 11 as a guest and have installed all the latest system updates for the guest.

To begin, unmount and eject any CD/DVD currently connected to your guest. If you have a CD/DVD mounted to your guest you will see a CD icon on your desktop, just right click on this and press eject.

Now in VMware Workstation go up to the VM menu item and then select Install VMware Tools….

After a few seconds you will have this window pop up. Double click on the item which ends in .rpm (in this version of VMware Tools it is VMwareTools-7.8.6-185404.i386.rpm)

You will now see this windows. Click Install. You will be asked for your root password, type it in and press Authenticate.

After a little while you will see this window. Don't worry about this message and just press Force install. You will be asked for your root password again, type it in and press Authenticate.

The installation of VMware Tools will now commence and take about 3 minutes to complete. VMware tools is now install but still needs to be configured.

The above section went though the process of installing the tools but now we need to configure them for the system.

We now need a terminal window to enter a few commands. Go to Applications at the top left of your guest, then System tools and then click on Terminal.

First we need to switch to the root user, type in the following:

su -

You will be asked for your root password, type it in and press enter.

Now we need to install the kernel development packages. Type in the following line:

yum -y install gcc kernel-devel patch make

This will install the required packages which we need.

Now we are ready to install the VMware Tools configuration utility. Type in the following commands:

vmware-config-tools.pl

During configuration you can press enter to all the options, the defaults are fine.

To complete the installation we need to tell Fedora to load VMware tools on startup.

Go up to System at the top of your screen, then select Preferences and then select Startup Applications.

You will now be presented with this window. Click on the Add button.

You will be presented with the Add Startup Program window. Enter the details as they appear in the screenshot above and then click on Add. Then click on Close on the Startup Applications window.

And finally restart your computer.

VMware Tools is now installed and your guest is fully configured to run as a virtual machine. Please note however that if Fedora release an updated kernel you will need to run the vmware-tools-config.pl program again.