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Oliver Kurth edited this page Apr 23, 2019 · 2 revisions

FAQ

Installation

How do I install open-vm-tools?

Most Linux distributions already ship open-vm-tools. Unless you have special requirements, this is the easiest way to install open-vm-tools. All distributions split the package into a system and a desktop component. The latter is only useful on systems that have a graphical UI (gnome or kde).

On Ubuntu and Debian:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install open-vm-tools open-vm-tools-desktop

On RHEL, CentOS and Fedora:

sudo yum install open-vm-tools open-vm-tools-desktop

On SLE and OpenSuSE:

zypper install open-vm-tools open-vm-tools-desktop

If your system does not have a packaged version of open-vm-tools, or if you have special requirements, you can build from source. See the steps in this FAQ about building.

Building

How can I build open-vm-tools?

These steps work on most systems:

autoreconf -i
./configure --without-kernel-modules
make
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig

By default, files will be installed to /usr/local, as is common with packages that use autoconf.

Running

How can I start open-vm-tools on boot?

If you installed open-vm-tools from your OS vendor, it should come shipped with init scripts customized to your particular distribution. We do not ship our own startup scripts because each Linux distribution is different.