Installing VMware Tools in Ubuntu 9.10

Bill Giannikos (Home Page)

In this guide we will be going through the process of correctly installing VMware Tools in Ubuntu 9.10. This guide assumes you have already installed VMware Workstation, have installed Ubuntu 9.10 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 9.10 then VMWare would have already installed the required tools for you. Therefore you don't need to follow this guide but you may like to view the PulseAudio section below to improve sound performance.

In this guide we will be using VMWare Workstation 7.

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…”. 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. Go to Applications at the top left of your guest, then Accessories and then click on 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

Answer Yes to any questions asked.

Next type in the following lines:

cd /tmp
tar -xzvf /media/cdrom/*tar.gz
cd vmware-tools-distrib
sudo ./vmware-install.pl

The last line here will ask for your password, type it in and press enter.

You will now be asked a few installation questions from the VMware Tools installer. For any standard installation the default answers are fine so you can press enter to every option.

Now reboot the computer and VMWare Tools will be activated. While it is usable in this state you will likely notice a performance issue when playing back sound. See the next section for details.

Ubuntu 9.10 includes PulseAudio as standard which does not seem to work properly at all within VMWware. If you notice stuttering sound output then you need to remove PulseAudio. Here is how:

We need a terminal window again so go to Applications at the top left of your guest, then Accessories and then click on Terminal.

Now enter the following commands (thank to nullrend from the Ubuntu forums):

sudo apt-get purge pulseaudio gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio
sudo apt-get autoremove
sudo apt-get install alsa-base alsa-tools alsa-tools-gui alsa-utils alsa-oss linux-sound-base alsamixergui esound esound-clients esound-common libesd-alsa0 gnome-alsamixer

Finally reboot the machine. Your audio output should now be working properly.

VMware Tools is now installed and your guest is fully configured to run as a virtual machine. Please note however that if Ubuntu release an updated kernel you will need to run the following command to reconfigure VMWare Tools for it:

sudo vmware-config-tools.pl