Installing VMware Tools in Fedora 12

Bill Giannikos (Home Page)

In this guide we will be going through the process of correctly installing VMware Tools in Fedora 12. This guide assumes you have already installed VMware Workstation, have installed Fedora 12 as a guest and have installed all the latest system updates for the guest. This guide is for VMware Workstation 7, but may work for VMware Workstation 6.5 as well.

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…. 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. Go to Applications → System Tools → Terminal.

2. Switch to the root user by entering the command “su -” (without the quotes) and typing in your root password.

3. Type in the following command:

cd /usr/src

4. Now we need to extract the contents of VMware Tools as follows:

tar -xzvf /media/VMware\ Tools/VMwareTools*

5. Enter the newly created folder:

cd vmware-tools-distrib

6. 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.

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

./vmware-install.pl

You will be asked a series of questions, for most people the defaults are fine so you can just press enter on each.

If there is a kernel update to Fedora you will need to rerun the configuration utility again. To do this, as root, enter the following command:

vmware-config-tools.pl

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

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