Comment 3 for bug 1513531

Apparently you need >10.0.0 of open-vm-tools on kernels >4.0 (vmware-tools installer gave that hint)

I tried backporting that from Xenial, by adding Xenial as a source repo in /etc/apt/sources.list, and then build it from the source package:

    cd /tmp
    apt-get update
    apt-get build-dep open-vm-tools open-vm-tools-desktop
    apt-get -b source open-vm-tools open-vm-tools-desktop

    dpkg -i *.deb

But that didn't work either, same error.

Installing from the VMWare Tools CD image did work fine and enabled file sharing with the host system after a reboot.