Installing VMware Tools in Fedora 17

Bill Giannikos

In this guide we will be going through the process of correctly installing VMware Tools in Fedora 17. This guide assumes you have already installed VMware Workstation, have installed Fedora 17 as a guest and have installed all the latest system updates for the guest. This guide is for VMware Workstation 8.0.4 but may work with other versions.

To begin, unmount and eject any CD/DVD currently connected to your guest. Also make sure you have installed all updates for the Fedora system.

Now in VMware Workstation go up to the VM menu item and then select Install VMware Tools…. If you are in graphic interface in a few seconds you will notice a window pop up, we do not need this window so it can be closed.

1. Load up a terminal window if you are in the graphic interface.

2. Switch to the root user by entering the command su - and typing in your root password. You can skip this step if you logged in as root to begin with.

3. Type in the following commands to extract the VMware Tools contents (you may get a error in the umount command, just ignore it):

cd /usr/src
mkdir /tmp/vmware
umount /dev/sr0
mount -o ro /dev/sr0 /tmp/vmware
tar -xzvf /tmp/vmware/VMwareTools*tar.gz
umount /dev/sr0

4. Enter the newly created folder:

cd vmware-tools-distrib

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

yum -y install gcc kernel-devel kernel-headers patch make

This will install the required packages which we need.

7. We can now run the VMware Tools installation program, type in the following:

./vmware-install.pl -d

For most people the defaults are fine but you may like to remove the -d for the above command if you would like a custom install.

VMware Tools is now installed and your guest is fully configured to run as a virtual machine.