In this video from ITFreeTraining I will look at installing VMWare Tools on Lubuntu, but
the process is pretty much the same regardless of which version of Linux you are using. VMWare
tools installs additional drivers in the operating system which may make devices available that
were not available before and also improves the responsiveness and performance of the
virtual machine.
To get started, I will change to my workstation which is running the vSphere client.
To start installing VMWare Tools, I need first right click on the virtual machine. From the
menu, select guest and then select the option “install/Upgrade VMware Tools”.
A message box will appear explaining that installing VMWare tools will give you enhanced
graphics and better performance but in order to start the install the guest operating system
needs to be running. Since my guest operating system is running I will select the option
o.k.
What will happen now is the ISO containing the VMWare software will be mounted and made
available to the operating system via the virtual optical drive. In order to start the
install, I next need to log in. Once logged in, the next step is to open a terminal to
run additional commands. To do this, I will go to the start menu and select LXTerminal
located under accessories.
In order to perform administration on a Linux system you need to use what is referred to
as root access. Rather than use root access all the time, Linux comes with a command called
sudo. Sudo will run a single command with root access meaning the user does not need
to login as root itself or an account with the same access.
To find out more about Sudo, or any other command, enter in man which is short for manual
followed by the command that you are interested in. This shows the help for that command otherwise
known as the man page. You can press enter to scroll down a single line or space bar
or page down to scroll a page at a time and lastly page up to go to the previous page.
Once finished, press q to quit and this will exit back to the prompt.
Sudo can be used to run single commands, however in this case I will run sudo followed by SU.
SU stands for super user and this effectively changes the command prompt to one with root
access.
Once I enter in the password, the user will change to root. This will give me the access
required to install VMWare tools. This software is available on the optical drive. To access
it, change the directory to media/router/VMWare Tools.
The software is compressed, so I am going to copy it using the cp command to the tmp
directory. The tmp directory is used by Linux for temporary storage. The directory is considered
volatile so don’t expect anything that you place in here to be available later. In
this case, I only want somewhere to decompress the files for the install so the tmp directory
is a good location for this.
I will now change to the tmp directory and run the command GunZip followed by the filename.
GunZip will decompress files with a gz extension.
Notice however that before gz is tar. Tar is software that was originally designed to
be used with tape drives to combine a lot of files and folders into one file. Single
tapes are sequential in nature, that is, data needs to process in order. Software needed
to be developed for tape drives to combine multiple files into one stream. Nowadays,
tar is also used to combine multiple files and folders into the one file for ease of
use.
To extract all the files to the hard disk, use the command tar minus xvf followed by
the filename. There are a lot of switches for tar, but these 3 letters essentially say
extract the files, give verbose output and input should be taken from a file.
You will notice that once I run the command, the files for the tar file will be restored
back to their original files and folders.
Now that the files have been extracted, I can now change to the directory of the install
files for the VMWare tools.
The next step is to run the install script for the VMWare install. This ends in pl for
Perl. Perl is one of the many scripting languages supported by Linux. I have added the –d
switch which automates the install, otherwise you will be asked a lot of questions during
the install.
With the –d switch, you will notice that I will only get asked a few question in which
I can accept the defaults. The process on this computer took a few minutes to complete,
but I have sped up the process so that we do not have to wait.
Once complete, the next step is to reboot the virtual machine, however before I do that
I am going to apply updates and configure the virtual machine to automatically download
updates.
If I go back a directory, I can run the rm command for remove with the switches r and
f followed by the directory of the install files. This will remove the directory including
any sub directories.
If I type in cd by itself, this will take me to my home directory. If I enter in pwd
this will show that the current directory is root, meaning that I am currently logged
in as root.
If I select software updater from the task bar, this will show the current updates settings
for the virtual machine.
You can see that the virtual machine is currently configured to check for updates daily. The
next option displays updates when they are available, in this case I will change this
option to download and install automatically. Since this virtual machine will be used as
a router, I want the virtual machine to run with as little administrator interaction as
possible.
Since I am changing an update setting, I will be prompted for a password. Once I exit out
of here the setting will be saved and the virtual machine will automatically update
by itself. I will get a prompt stating some updates have been found and do I want to install
them. In this case I will close the dialog box and not install the updates at this time
as I want to install the updates from the command line.
To do this, all I need to do is first run the command apt-get followed by update. This
command does not install any updates, what it essentially does is updates the locally
stored list of available packages. This is used to compare what is installed locally
with what is available on the internet. Before you install additional packages you should
ensure this list is up to date otherwise you may not be installing the latest packages
that are available.
Once the list has updated, I will run the command apt-get followed by upgrade. This
will upgrade any existing packages on the system where there is an update available
online. The process on this computer took just under 10 minutes to complete so I will
pause the video and return later on.
The system has now been upgraded and VMWare tools have been installed. In order to complete
the process, all that needs to happen now is the system needs to be rebooted. Installing
VMWare Tools will improve the overall performance of the virtual machine but it also installs
additional device drivers. For example, if your network adapter was not being detected,
installing VMWare tools may help install the missing driver.
Once the system has rebooted, notice that one of the most noticeable features of VMWare
tools is that the mouse moves seamless between the virtual machine and the operating system.
Before VMWare tools was installed, you would need to press the ctrl and alt keys together
in order to release the mouse from the virtual machine.
Thanks for watching this video from ITFreeTraining. I hope you found it useful and I hope to see
you in the next video. Thanks and see you next time.