Installing VMware Tools in Ubuntu 12.10 with kernel 3.7.x

Recently I have installed VMware Workstation 9.0.1 inside a vm running on Ubuntu 12.10 with latest kernel 3.7.1.

(Click here to upgrade Ubuntu kernel to latest 3.7.1)

For some reason the vmware-modconfig script for compile/recompile/install seems to be unable to detect the changes in latest kernel 3.7 series. Some header files have been relocated in kernel 3.7 series which go undetected by not so clever VMware.

Installing VMware Tools

In the menu bar of VMware click on VM menu and you would find “Install VMware Tools...” second last option. Click on it and a DVD named “VMware Tools” will automatically mount. Open the DVD from Unity side menu and copy the “VMwareTools-8.8.4-743747.tar.gz” file to your desktop. Open a terminal and extract it using below command.

$ tar -xzvf VMwareTools-8.8.4-743747.tar.gz

You will find a directory named “vmware-tools-distrib” created on the desktop. Run the script “vmware-install.pl” in that directory using the below command

$ sudo ./vmware-install.pl

All I did was to set all the default options. There's a point where the installer asks about the valid kernel header path and will ask you to change it. Due to the relocated kernel 3.7 header files the vmware tools installer isn't able to locate the header files in it's default location. Here just open another terminal copy the relocated header files needed to their default location. Follow the below mentioned instructions.

$ cd /usr/src/linux-headers-3.7.1-030701-generic/include

$ sudo ln -sf ../generated/uapi/linux/version.h

$ sudo ln -sf ../generated/utsrelease.h

$ sudo ln -sf ../generated/autoconf.h

Now in the previous terminal where the installer is running, put the “/usr/src/linux-headers-3.7.1-030701-generic/include/” path for the valid linux kernel header files and the installation shall continue as normal.

As you can see from the above screenshots the VMware Tools 8.8.4 has been successfully configured for kernel 3.7.1-030701-generic.