Sunday, September 21, 2008

Installing VMware tools on CentOS 5.2

Running CentOS as a guest OS with VMware is OK without VMware tools installed. However there may be some problems with mouse/screen etc. Installing VMware tools on CentOS can be accomplished by using RPMs that come with VMware workstation. I have encountered a few problems whilst trying to install VMware tools. I could not unload pcnet32 module and the system did not shut down gracefully. After digging through the Internet and experimenting I came up with the following.

  1. Disable ipv6 by modifying /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf.dist and adding anywhere install ipv6 /bin/true (and disabling iptables for ipv6 later on)

  2. Start CentOS in a single user mode by typing as root: init 1 or /sbin/init 1

  3. Then run vmware-config-tools.pl

  4. After the installation complete, reboot

  5. I also have a button on the gnome panel with the following command gksu vmware-toolbox to be able to copy and paste between guest and host operating systems.

  6. A slightly more elegant solution would be to put /usr/bin/vmware-user & line into /etc/rc.local with no window to close after the program starts. To modify the settings, vmware-toolbox can be started manually as needed. In Ubuntu it is even easier SYSTEM > PREFERENCES > SESSIONS and in startup programs tab ADD NAME and /usr/bin/vmware-user &

No comments: