I have an early 2011 intel macbook and I run linux VM using Vmware fusion 4.x. Earlier I was using an Ubuntu VM for development that had 2.6.x kernel. Now, I wanted to upgrade my development VM to Debian wheezy for assorted reasons. One of them was having a rolling distribution because I do not want to full upgrade my installation all the time.
The problem with installing Debian wheezy or any other linux 3.x series kernel in vmware fusion is that the vmware tools shipped with fusion is not compatible with linux 3.0 and 3.2 kernels. The VMware tools only work with 2.6.x kernel headers. Now this is a big headache as I need to mount my macbook directories inside my VM. Other nuisance is that your mouse will be captured inside vm window if you do not install the tools. in short, I want a life with vmware tools.
So open-vm-tools came to my rescue. This is one of the moments in life when you did not know about existence of something that is so essential to your existence! All my life of running linux VM on macbook and I did not know that this project exists! As it happens open-vm-tools are rolled with Debian so installing them is super easy.
First install the prerequisites
The problem with installing Debian wheezy or any other linux 3.x series kernel in vmware fusion is that the vmware tools shipped with fusion is not compatible with linux 3.0 and 3.2 kernels. The VMware tools only work with 2.6.x kernel headers. Now this is a big headache as I need to mount my macbook directories inside my VM. Other nuisance is that your mouse will be captured inside vm window if you do not install the tools. in short, I want a life with vmware tools.
So open-vm-tools came to my rescue. This is one of the moments in life when you did not know about existence of something that is so essential to your existence! All my life of running linux VM on macbook and I did not know that this project exists! As it happens open-vm-tools are rolled with Debian so installing them is super easy.
First install the prerequisites
$aptitude install linux-headers-`uname -r` libx11-6 libx11-dev xorg libxtst6 psmisc build-essential ia32-libs ia32-libs-gtk
The Debian wiki mentions x-window-system and x-window-system-core but those packages are now provided by xorg. Now install the open-vm-tools packages using $sudo aptitude install
- open-vm-tools
- open-vm-dkms
- open-vm-tools-dev
- open-vm-toolbox
After the installation, try querying the vmware tools modules
%modinfo vmxnet
%modinfo vmhgfs
if the required kernel modules are not loaded then we have to do so via dkms (Dynamic kernel module support). To install required kernel modules
% dkms add open-vm-tools/2011.12.20
% dkms build open-vm-tools/2011.12.20
% dkms install open-vm-tools/2011.12.20
Last number in red is the module version, you can get this number by using
$sudo aptitude show open-vm-tools
Look for version string (after the + sign)
Run modinfo again and verify that we have the required modules. Shut down the VM. Map shares using VMware fusion settings. Start the VM. Now we should have VMware tools loaded.
$vmware-hgfsclient
The output should match with the shared folders
To mount the shared folders, you can do something like. Here Public is the folder name that we shared via VMware fusion. We mount this folder at /mnt/hgfs.
$sudo mount -t vmhgfs -v -o rw .host:/Public /mnt/hgfs
