Ubuntu
vmware-server package

  1. Bug #188391
  2. Comment #9

Comment 9 for bug 188391

Revision history for this message
Rouben (rouben) wrote :

Seeing how there are no updates on this bug, I feel compelled to share the following workaround. Here's what one needs to do to get VMware ESX 3.0.2's latest tools to compile properly on Hardy JeOS:

1. Start VMware Tools Install. Mount /media/cdrom (or whatever you call your CD-ROM drive) and grab the tools tarball from it. At the time of writing, the latest tarball name was VMwareTools-3.0.2-69376.tar.gz.
2. Copy the above mentioned tarball to root's home directory. Untar it the usual way (tar xvfz VMwareTools-3.0.2-69376.tar.gz).
3. Download the open-vm-tools source package from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=204462 (I used the 2008.04.14 release; although there's a newer one now, I haven't tested it yet). Again, in my case the open-vm-tools tarball was named open-vm-tools-2008.04.14-87182.tar.gz.
4. Untar the open-vm-tools tarball the usual way as well with tar xvfz open-vm-tools-2008.04.14-87182.tar.gz.
5. For each subdirectory in open-vm-tools-2008.04.14-87182/modules/linux/, rename it to *-only and then create an uncompressed tarball named after the directory... in other words, vmmemctl directory gets renamed to vmmemctl-only and then packaged into vmmemctl.tar. When you untar the resulting tar archive, it should create the -only directory (i.e. it shoud be included in the tarball).
6. Replace the tarballs in vmware-tools-distrib/lib/modules/source with the tarballs you just created.
7. Run VMware tools install as usual. Things should compile OK.

I realize these steps are a tad painful, so I'll try including a tarball that contains all the tarballs from the open-vm-tools package premade already. All you need to do is copy them over to vmware-tools-distrib/lib/modules/source and run the installer. Note that these are the April 14th version, which is not necessarily the latest release of open-vm-tools.

I hope this helps someone... it certainly is an alternative to Hanno's solution, in case your site absolutely requires the use of the pre-bundled VMware tools package.