Ubuntu 9.10 and vmhgfs with open-vm-tools
So today I was busy configuring a install of Ubuntu 9.10 as a virtual server in VMWare to use as my home server for maintaining a Redmine installation, as well as hosting some old Subversion repositories and my private Git repositories. To my surprise vmware-tools did not work. Done a bit of searching and found out that 9.10 isn’t really compatible. It works fine in Ubuntu 8.04 by the way.
My main concern was that I couldn’t use the vmhgfs driver to mount directories on my host machine. It turns out open-vm-tools provides the same stuff as vmware-tools and is available in the Ubuntu repositories. Surprisingly after installing open-vm-tools and rebooting the vmhgfs wasn’t loaded, nor could I load it.
To get vmhgfs to work you need to do the following:
-
sudo m-a
Go to SELECT. Mark open-vm in the list and go to OK. Then choose BUILD. Afterwards it’ll ask you to load the module. Answer with YES.
Next is setting up your mount point.
-
sudo mkdir -p /mnt/hgfs
-
# Give read-write access and allow exec. Files utf8 encoded.
-
sudo echo ".host:/ /mnt/hgfs vmhgfs auto,rw,exec,utf8 0 0" >> /etc/fstab
Something is probably wrong with my configuration as my share won’t mount at startup. So I edited /etc/rc.local to mount the file at startup. My rc.local looks a little bit like this:
-
mount /mnt/hgfs
-
exit 0
Now reboot to make sure everything works as expected. It should.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Thanks, I’ve been tearing my hair out trying to get this to work.
You’re welcome! Although in 10.04 the open-vm driver won’t build for me. Pity.
[...] an earlier post by me I described how to get open-vm-tools working in Ubuntu 9.10. Turns out that this [...]
Amazing. You saved me hours of agony!