I usually run several VM on VMWare Workstation just for study or test purpose. Because of this I found the VMWare tools very usefully, especially for the copy/paste and auto desktop resize option that allow me to use the VMs in a full screen mode.
Installing VMWare tools on Windows it’s very simple, instead, on Linux it require some additional steps. Following we will see the procedure on Kali Linux, but will be similar on all other Debian like distro.
From september 2015, VMware recommends using the open-vm-tools instead of the VMware tools package for guest machines provided by the VMWare Workstation. The open-vm-tools are available by the official Kali repo.
- Adding official repository to sources.list
- Update the apt installer with the new repository
- Install the VMWare tool with apt
- Finally, restart the Guest OS
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mattia@kalibox:~$ sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list #Adding following line deb http://http.kali.org/kali kali-rolling main contrib non-free |
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mattia@kalibox:~$ sudo apt-get update Get:1 http://kali.mirror.garr.it/mirrors/kali kali-rolling InRelease [24.6 kB] Get:2 http://kali.mirror.garr.it/mirrors/kali kali-rolling/main amd64 Packages [13.7 MB] Get:3 http://kali.mirror.garr.it/mirrors/kali kali-rolling/non-free amd64 Packages [144 kB] Fetched 13.9 MB in 21s (658 kB/s) Reading package lists... Done |
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mattia@kalibox:~$ sudo apt-get install open-vm-tools-desktop Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following additional packages will be installed: open-vm-tools The following NEW packages will be installed: open-vm-tools open-vm-tools-desktop 0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1239 not upgraded. Need to get 0 B/723 kB of archives. After this operation, 2,888 kB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue? [Y/n] Y ###### OUTPUT OMITTED ###### |
Now you have VMware tools up and running. Have a fun!