Installing VMware Tools in Fedora 13

Bill Giannikos (Home Page)

In this guide we will be going through the process of correctly installing VMware Tools in Fedora 13. This guide assumes you have already installed VMware Workstation, have installed Fedora 13 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 although this has not been tested.

Previous guides here on LinWik had us installing the VMWare Tools provided by VMWare themselves, however recently VMWare have released much of their toolset under the GPL which has now been released as the Open-VM-Tools package. This allows us far easier installation and upgrade method so we will now be using the Open-VM-Tools package for VMWare support.

Fedora does not include the Open-VM-Tools package as standard so we will be using the third party RPM Fusion repository to install the required components.

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

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

3. If you don't already have the RPM Fusion repository active then type in the following (all on one line):

rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

4. Type in the following command to install the tools:

yum -y install open-vm-tools

5. Now restart the virtual machine and the tools will be activated.

The new Open-VM-Tools is now installed and your guest is fully configured to run as a virtual machine.