In an earlier post by me I described how to get open-vm-tools working in Ubuntu 9.10. Turns out that this doesn’t quite work for the latest version of Ubuntu, 10.04. A few tickets were spent on it at Launchpad and finally last night someone, I presume the module author, said you also need to install open-vm-dkms. Which I did. After this the module vmhgfs is available again and can be loaded.

So, when you install open-vm-tools and you want to make use of the vmhgfs driver you need to install open-vm-dkms. Otherwise compiling it yourself with m-a will fail. Note that with this step you no longer need to compile it yourself, as apt-get does it for you.

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:

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.

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:

Now reboot to make sure everything works as expected. It should.