Installing VMware Tools in Ubuntu 12.04 or Linux Mint 13

Bill Giannikos

In this guide we will be going through the process of correctly installing VMware Tools in Ubuntu 12.04 or Linux Mint 13. This guide assumes you have already installed VMware Workstation, have installed Ubuntu 12.04 or installed Linux Mint 13 as a guest and have installed all the latest system updates for the guest.

VMWare has a feature called “Easy Install”. If you used this feature to install Ubuntu 12.04 or Linux Mint 13 then VMWare would have already installed the required tools for you.

In this guide we will be using VMWare Workstation 8.0.4.

To begin, unmount and eject any CD/DVD currently connected to your guest.

Now in VMware Workstation go up to the VM menu item and then select “Install VMware Tools…”. You will now see a window open in the guest however we do not need it so it can be closed.

We now need a terminal window to enter a few commands.
For Ubuntu: Go to Dash Home at the top left of your guest, type in terminal and click on the Terminal program.
For Linux Mint 13: Go to Menu, type in terminal and click on the Terminal

We now need to install the required building packages. In the terminal type in the following:

sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-`uname -r` gcc make

The last line here may ask for your password, type it in and press enter. Then answer Yes to any questions asked.

Next type in the following lines:

cd /tmp
tar -xzvf /media/VMware\ Tools/*tar.gz
cd vmware-tools-distrib
sudo ./vmware-install.pl -d

The last line here may ask for your password, type it in and press enter. The VMware Tools will now be installed.

After the installation has completed reboot the computer and VMWare Tools will be activated.

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