Installing VMware Tools with VMware Player

As other sites have demonstrated, it is possible to create a VMware disk image using free tools and install a full-fledged virtual operating system using the free VMware Player. However, VMware Player does not provide VMware Tools, a set of programs that considerably improve VMware performance.

The following procedure shows how to extract and install the VMware Tools image from the VMware Workstation "tarball" (.tar.gz file). In this example, my guest system is Windows XP Professional, and my host system is Ubuntu 7.04.

Is it legal to do this? According to this thread, yes.

1. Download the latest "Archived Version" of VMware Workstation in .tar.gz format at http://www.vmware.com/download/ws/. You do not need to be registered nor have a VMware Workstation license key to download this version.

Example:
$ wget http://download3.vmware.com/software/wkst/VMware-workstation-5.5.0-18463.tar.gz

2. Locate and extract the windows.iso VMware Tools image from the tarball.

Locate the windows.iso file (example):
$ tar ztvf VMware-workstation-5.5.0-18463.tar.gz | grep windows.iso
vmware-distrib/lib/isoimages/windows.iso

Extract the windows.iso file (example):
$ tar zxvf VMware-workstation-5.5.0-18463.tar.gz vmware-distrib/lib/isoimages/windows.iso

Or, to extract windows.iso without creating the vmware-distrib/lib/isoimages directory structure, use pax:
$ pax -zrvf VMware-workstation-5.5.0-18463.tar.gz -s,vmware-distrib/lib/isoimages/,, vmware-distrib/lib/isoimages/windows.iso

3. Mount the windows.iso file as a loopback file system, and either share the loopback file system with Samba, or copy the VMware Tools files to a location accessible by your guest system.

$ mkdir /tmp/vmware_tools
$ mount -o loop windows.iso /tmp/vmware_tools

4. In your guest system, run setup.exe from the VMware Tools directory.

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Installing VMware Tools with VMware Player

Last modified: 2007/08/02