SuperJason’s Personal Blog

UPDATE!

Most of this post is now pointless, because the latest version of VMware Workstation NOW supports Ubuntu 6.06. It has a copy of the compiled tools, so you can now skip getting all of the Linux source and headers. That used to be the case only with VMware Server 1.0.

The latest version of VMware workstation 5.5 (as of this writing build 19175), does NOT support the VMware tools out of the box for Ubuntu 6.06. Basically, that just means that they are not easy to install, because you would need to have all the files necessary to recompile them for that specific version.  I found that out the hard way. VMware publishes the compatibility guide at this location: http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/ws_pubs.html.  For 5.5, it specifically says that only VMware server 1.0 supports Ubuntu 6.06.  Of course I wish I had known that before I did all the work to recompile the tools for Workstation 5.5.  Here is the rough version of the commands that I used:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential
sudo apt-get install linux-source-2.6.15
sudo apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.15-23-server
cd /usr/src
sudo bzip2 -d linux-source-2.6.15.tar.bz2
sudo tar xvf linux-source-2.6.15.tar
sudo ln -s linux-source-2.6.15 linux
sudo mv /usr/src/linux-source-2.6.15/include /usr/src/linux-source-2.6.15/include.orig
sudo ln -s /usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.15-23-server/include /usr/src/linux-source-2.6.15/include
sudo mount /dev/hdc
** change to home folder
tar zxvf /media/cdrom/VMwareTools-1.0.0-28343.tar.gz
cd VMwareTools-1.0.0-28343

** Run the VMware tools install script here

sudo apt-get remove build-essential
sudo apt-get remove linux-source-2.6.15
sudo apt-get remove linux-headers-2.6.15-23-server
sudo rm -f -r /usr/src/*

sudo reboot

HOWEVER, the much much much easier way they can be installed is by using VMware Server 1.0.  Since it’s newer than 5.5, it has a precompiled version of the tools for that operating system.  VMware Server 1.0 will read 5.5 images, so temporary load the virtual machine with the server, install the tools, and then use it on workstation 5.5.

So you might be asking yourself “Is this really worth it? Why would I do this?”.  That’s understandable. If you’re using the Ubuntu desktop version, you get the cool ability to move the cursor seamlessly between the host and the guest, and vice versa. You also get drag and drop capabilities, and the full client toolbox of nifty things you can use such as “shrink”.

On both the desktop and server versions, you get the advantage of increased network performance, due to the native VMware network card driver.  You also get rid of the nag message in the host window when running the machine.  As last of all, you get heartbeat functionality, so that VMware server can tell if a virtual machine is still alive.