How to install VMware Tools in a Debian VM

In this small tutorial I want to show you how to install the VMware tools in a Debian VM.

VMware Tools is a set of services and components that enable various features in different VMware products for better management and seamless user interaction with guest operating systems.

Open VM Tools (open-vm-tools) is the open source implementation of VMware Tools for Linux guest operating systems.

For more Information please visit: https://docs.vmware.com/de/VMware-Tools/index.html

VMware Tools is not installed on this virtual machine

To install VMware Tools, we can click once on “Install VMware Tools…” as shown in the screenshot to the right or go to Actions from there on Guest OS and then “Install VMware Tools…”

Then a window pops up where you can mount VMware Tools via virtual CD/DVD:

after mounting we change to the VM via SSH and mount the virtual CD/DVD in Debian:

mount /dev/cdrom /mnt

Change to the mount directory and copy the VMware Tools.tar.gz into the temporary directory and change into it:

cd /mnt
cp VMwareTools-10.3.5-10430147.tar.gz /tmp
cd /tmp

Then we unpack the .tar.gz archive:

tar xfz VMwareTools-10.3.5-10430147.tar.gz

Finally, we change to the appropriate directory to run VMware Tools and reboot the system:

cd vmware-tools-distrib/
./vmware-install.pl
reboot

That’s it from this little tutorial, if you have any questions, feel free to post it in the comments. 🙂