Adding VMware Tools into basic Debian VM installation

An addition to my collection of ’steps’.

I’m setting up a very basic Debian VM, with mere 64MB of RAM, and 2GB of hard drive storage. If I were to leisurely install stuff inside, I am very sure that it would be filled up in no time at all. Now it is a call to save as much storage space as possible.

My Debian installation is very basic, during ‘tasksel’ (installation bundle selection) session, I didn’t pick anything. Not even ‘Standard’ package. As it is running in a virtual machine (VM), one of the earliest task is to get VMware Tools installed. Of course there are a number of packages which would need to be installed prior to VMware Tools installation. These packages would be removed once VMware Tools has been installed. I’m logging it in here…

Package needed for installation:-

• First, a package that supplies ‘killall’, psmisc.

Configuration-wise, installation locations are as follows:

• Binary location: /usr/bin
• Directory that contains rc0.d to rc6.d: /etc
• Init scripts location: /etc/init.d
• Daemons: /usr/sbin
• Libraries: /usr/lib/vmware-tools
• Documentations: /usr/share/doc/vmware-tools

Now for initial configuration of VMware Tools, ‘/usr/bin/vmware-config-tools.pl’…

Packages needed:-

• make
• gcc, which also installs: binutils, cpp, cpp-4.1 gcc-4.1 libssp0
• linux-headers-`uname -r`, which in my case installed: linux-headers-2.6.18-6, linux-headers-2.6.18-6-686, and linux-kbuild-2.6.18

By having all the packages above installed, I had vmxnet module and vmgfs module compiled and successfully installed. Later, it got vmblock module built and installed as well.

… and the standard command I have to use to replace with better NIC driver:-

/etc/init.d/networking stop
rmmod pcnet32
rmmod vmxnet
depmod -a
modprobe vmxnet
/etc/init.d/networking start

OK. So far VMware Tools has been successfully installed and running well in the VM. Let’s remove back the packages we’ve added.

– Interim –

I’m now in the office, so I would have to remote into my VM to do stuff. I’d install OpenSSH-server package, which will actually install:-

• libedit2
• libkrb53
• openssh-blacklist
• openssh-client
• openssh-server

If you happen to like Webmin for administration, Webmin would have these packages installed:-

• libauthen-pam-perl
• libio-pty-perl
• libmd5-perl
• libnet-ssleay-perl
• openssl
• perl
• perl-modules
• webmin

– Interim end –