Similar to VirtualBox guest additions, VMware Player has what are referred to as “Tools” which allow for advanced features required to get the most from our virtual installations. In this short How-To, I wanted to cover getting those installed as the instructions at VMware aren’t really as cut and dry as many people would prefer. In this example, we will be installing the extra tools for a Debian 7.2 guest installation. Just for the record, I went through this once already installing Mint 16 and it was even easier with that distribution then with Debian, however, most of the steps are close to the same.
First thing to do is launch the VMware PLayer
As we will be working with Debian 7.2, we’re going to select that from the left hand column and get it up and running
The next image shows what the installation is like to work with before the VMware Tools are installed. In this condition, working with your VM is less than fun to say the least considering the entire screen size on this particular laptop is only 15”. What we want to do is max this out so that working in our VM is as close to a native installation as possible.
The above view shows the VM maximized on the host. When in the default window size before loading in the extra tools, we will be working with a screen that looks like the one below. We want to click on the button below the VM desktop that says install VM Tools.
After this, in the footer, it’s going to give some instructions to follow but don’t worry about those too much; those instructions are what we are covering here. What we need to do next is eject the disk (if it’s still in the drive) or in this case, I used the iso file to install the OS so we need to go into Places and eject the iso file from the virtual drive. Once the iso is ejected from the virtual drive, the VM will automatically mount the VMware Tools disk and open it for us to get to the Tar file inside which holds the information we are looking for.
Once we are in the drive and find our Tar file, we want to copy this over to the tmp folder found in our root files; simply copy and paste to do this. There is no need to become root to paste this file into the tmp folder.
Once the Tar file has been copied over, eject the disk from the virtual drive and come back to the temp folder. Perform a right-click on the Tar file and extract the contents directly into the tmp folder. There is nothing more than another folder inside the Tar file called vmware-tools-distrib that holds the files we need to do our installation. Once that file is extracted, double click on it to get inside.
Once inside this file, we will find the compiled program we want to run and it needs to be run from the terminal. In some distributions, there is an option to “run terminal from here” which is one of my favorite handy dandy apps (so much easier than having to navigate through the CLI). If that is not an option, open a terminal as root or become root in a terminal and navigate to the folder with vmware-install.pl in it. Run the command as in the screenshot above to run the installation.
./vmware-install.pl
Accept all the defaults
If we are lucky, such as was the case when I did this with Mint, there will be no dependency packages to have to chase down. With Debian, I had to shut down the installation and install some dependencies then come back and do these steps all over again. Not a big deal really, but just slightly annoying. The installer is pretty smart and knows how to deal with this situation so don’t panic if the first time around you have to go back and do some other stuff. It will rewrite everything and repeat the process as many times as necessary without breaking anything.
Once all is said and done, restart your installation and when the OS has completely boot click on maximize and now we should be working with a full screen installation such as the one below.
Definitely a better looking environment and more practical than the tiny screen we started out with.
This is one way to do the installation which is simply a variation to the original instruction found at VMware located at the link below. In their instruction they will walk you through the command line operations. They’re kind of dated, but the concept is pretty much the same.
http://www.vmware.com/support/ws55/doc/new_guest_tools_ws.html
