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Installing VMWare Tools on Lubuntu

This video will look at installing VMWare tools on Lubuntu. VMware tools adds additional features and drivers to the operating system. This improves the performance of the operating system and also allows the host operating system to interact with the virtual machine better.

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Demonstration
1) On vSphere right click the virtual machine and select guest and then select “Install/Upgrade VMware tools”. This will mount an ISO to the virtual machine cdrom in which you can install VMware Tools from.

2) In order to install VMWare tools, a script needs to be run from the ISO. In order to do this a terminal needs to be opened. In Lubuntu this is done by opening the start menu and selecting LXTerminal from under accessories. In different versions of Linux, this shortcut may be somewhere else.

3) If you want to find out more information about any command, enter “man” followed by the command you want to find out about. E.g. man sudo. This will bring up the man page which is short for manual which is the built-in help system used by Unix and Linux systems. To move around a page use the up and down keys. To move up a page press page up and to move down a page press page down.

4) In order to run the script, this script needs to be run as root. To change to the root user run the command “sudo su”. This opens a shell that has root access, however you can also run individual commands using the sudo command.

5) To change to the directory with VMWare Tools files, enter in “cd /media/router/VMware\ Tools/”. Depending on which user you are using and which operating system that you are using this path may be different.

6) In this particular case I am going to copy the file to the /tmp directory in order to decompress. This is done with the command “cp VMwareTools-9.0.0-782409.tar.gz /tmp”. The /tmp is used for temporary files so any file that is copied into it, do not expect it to be available later on.

7) To decompress the file run the command “gunzip VMwareTools-9.0.0-782409.tar.gz”. This will decompress the file and save a new copy to the same filename without the gz extension.

8) The file contains many smaller files that have been combined together using tar. To extract them use the command “tar –xvf VMwareTools-9.0.0-782409.tar”.

9) Once the files are extracted, run the command “./vmware-install.pl –d.” The –d parameter tells the script to accept the default values when running.

10) To remove the file and folders containing the install files run the command “rm –rf vmware-tools-distrib”.

11) Once the install is complete, you will need to reboot the virtual machine.

References

Credits

Lesson tags: lab
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