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:
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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.
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sudo mkdir -p /mnt/hgfs
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# Give read-write access and allow exec. Files utf8 encoded.
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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:
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mount /mnt/hgfs
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exit 0
Now reboot to make sure everything works as expected. It should.
4 comments so far...
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!