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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.

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