According to the release notes for Fusion 2.0.2, VMWare Fusion:
Supports Ubuntu 8.10 as a guest operating system, including features such as VMware Tools with prebuilt kernel modules, Easy Install, and Unity.
…and I did find this to be the case, until the first system upgrade hit and I had to reboot. Then I found that I could no longer resize the window and have the desktop adjust resolutions appropriately, and copy/paste no longer worked between desktops. In short, VMWare Tools was broken.
How to fix it
If you’re unlucky enough to have this happen to you, I suggest the following:
- Optional first step: in your Ubuntu VM, type: sudo apt-get install ssh to install SSH. This at least allows you to access the box from your Mac with copy/paste etc. (To find out the IP address, type ifconfig, and note the eth0 ... inet addr: value.);
- Invoke the following command as root (either with sudo or as root itself): /usr/bin/vmware-config-tools.pl;
- Answer the default answer to each of the questions asked (most of them are yes, except for the experimental question).
- Restart your box.
You should now have a working VMWare Tools installation that survives over reboots. Makes playing with Linux desktops much more palatable.
Final notes
VMWare Tools seems like it fails to start after updating the system due to the following error:
/usr/lib/vmware-tools/sbin32/vmware-guestd: error while loading shared libraries: libdnet.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
I don’t know enough about Linux to have a guess what that means, but I suppose that when VMWare Tools is re–compiled in the steps mentioned above that it reconciles this issue.
…and why was I trying out Ubuntu?
I’m currently learning Erlang, and since the Mac version is a bit crippled and slow it seemed best to use a Linux distro to do so.