I forget these steps all the time, so I figured I should record them here.

A lot of times VMWare will auto-install the VMWare tools for you when you first setup your VM. However, many times after setting it up I’ll do updates, and updates to the kernel will be applied, knocking out the VMWare Tools changes. These tools are used for things like file sharing between the guest and host.

So here are the steps to take to fully update and re-install the VMWare Tools. I got most of these from an article on Ubuntu’s website.

First, sudo aptitude update to make sure all my repository information is up-to-date.

Second, sudo aptitude safe-upgrade to get any and all updates for my newly installed OS.

Third, sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-`uname -r` psmisc to install the linux headers for my kernel.

Fourth, copy and install the VMWare Tools:

# make a mount point if needed : sudo mkdir /media/cdrom

Mount the CD

sudo mount /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom

Make a dir for the VMWare Tools files

mkdir ~/vmtools

Copy and extract VMWareTools

sudo cp /media/cdrom/VMwareTools*.tar.gz ~/vmtools

You can extract with archive manager, right click on the archive and extract … or

cd ~/vmtools tar xvf VMwareTools*.tar.gz

Install the tools

cd vmware-tools-distrib sudo ./vmware-install.pl

Just follow the prompts and hit for all the default values.