Skip to main content

Installing VMwareTools in Debian-based distos

Although I'm using Oracle's Linux in the data center at work, I still keep up with other distributions. Just to check out what's going on and keep up.

Lately, I've been playing with a new MediaWiki virtual appliance (VA) at work - where we keep most rough documentation and work-in-progress before moving it over to MS Word offial reports - and I must say turnkeylinux.org builds some mean VAs using Ubuntu JeOS. A 180MB ISO file is all you need. You create a VM, mount the ISO, boot, enter some root passwords and your set. It's integrated with Webmin, so you can completely configure the VM using your browser. No need to ssh into anything. :) Kudos!

Anyway, I was going to install VMwareTools into the VM and remembered VMware had opened an apt-style repository for VMwareTools for use with Debian-based Linux distributions. So I made a few changes to the VM and installed it using apt-get! Wow! I love Debian, did I mention that before. ;) Here is what I did:
wget http://packages.vmware.com/tools/VMWARE-PACKAGING-GPG-KEY.pub

Create a new sources list for VMware:
vi /etc/apt/sources.list.d/vmware.list

Add these two lines making sure to match the ESX version you are using. Don't know what happens if this mismatches. Use caution!
deb http://packages.vmware.com/tools/esx/3.5u4/ubuntu hardy main
deb http://packages.vmware.com/tools/esx/3.5u4/ubuntu hardy restricted

Import the GPG key for apt:
apt-key add VMWARE-PACKAGING-GPG-KEY.pub

Now update and install:
apt-get update
apt-get install [vmware-tools|vmware-tools-nox]


Use vmware-tools-nox to skip X11/x.org packages which you probably don't use anyway.
NB: You may need to install some additional packages needed for compiling. Check this turnkey forum post.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Preventing PuTTY timeouts

Just found a great tip to prevent timeouts of PuTTY sessions. I'm fine with timeouts by the host, but in our case the firewall kills sessions after 30 minutes of inactivity... When using PuTTY to ssh to your Linux/Unix servers, be sure to use the feature to send NULL packets to prevent a timeout. I've set it to once every 900 seconds, i.e. 15 minutes... See screenshot on the right.
1 comment
Read more

Tuning the nscd name cache daemon

I've been playing a bit with the nscd now and want to share some tips related to tuning the nscd.conf file. To see how the DNS cache is doing, use nscd -g. nscd configuration: 0 server debug level 26m 57s server runtime 5 current number of threads 32 maximum number of threads 0 number of times clients had to wait yes paranoia mode enabled 3600 restart internal passwd cache: no cache is enabled [other zero output removed] group cache: no cache is enabled [other zero output removed] hosts cache: yes cache is enabled yes cache is persistent yes cache is shared 211 suggested size 216064 total data pool size 1144 used data pool size 3600 seconds time to live for positive entries 20 seconds time to live for negative entries 66254 cache hi...
2 comments
Read more

Dell Linux - OMSA Hardware Monitoring

Just getting started using Dell's OpenManage Server Administrator (OMSA) on our Oracle Linux platform. There are some confusing instructions going around so it's not immediately clear what to do, hence my blogging here. :) There is a site on Dell - Hardware Monitoring , as well as a wiki with instruction on how to setup their OMSA tooling using yum or up2date. [update]My first update for their instructions: be sure your server has Internet access, as most servers will use a proxy or so. use export http_proxy=http://yourproxy.example.com:port to configure it just for the session, and setup up2date to use an HTTP proxy by editing the settings in /etc/sysconfig/rhn/up2date .
2 comments
Read more