Once you installed Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy as a guest OS in VMware, you have to install VMware tools to make it work perfectly. Anyway, some components, e.g., vmhgfs, are unavailable as a pre-compiled module for up-to-date kernel in Ubuntu. Fortunately, VMware offers source codes to recompile on our machines manually. However, the problem is the kernel was compiled using gcc-3.4.5 while the default gcc installed by Ubuntu is gcc-4.0. VMware don’t let us to compile in this situation.

One of the best feature provided by Ubuntu is multiple version deployment. You can install both gcc-4.0 and gcc-3.4.5 without problem. So the steps to install VMware tools successfully are as follows.

1. Install default compiler

   apt-get install build-essential

2. Install gcc-3.4.5

   apt-get install gcc-3.4.5 g++-3.4.5

3. Install kernel header

   apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`

4. Extract VMware tools
5. Run vmware-install.pl by specific gcc

   CC=/usr/bin/gcc-3.4 ./vmware-install.pl

6. Restart to make sure everything works just fine

Many thanks to denisesballs for his great article.

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