How To Install VMWare Tools v4 on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Server

How To Install VMWare Tools v4 on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Server and 12.10 Server

Written: March 13, 2012
Originally posted by: Justin Schier
Last Updated: October 24, 2012
Tested With: Ubuntu 12.10 Server, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Server, Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS Server, Ubuntu 11.10 Server

All the guides I found on the Internet, including VMWare’s website were outdated in some way, so I decided to write a guide of my own. I just went through these steps from start to finish on a fresh server and had no problems. In about 5 minutes, you will be able to install VMWare Tools on Ubuntu Server.

1. Use Install VMWare Tools option in VMWare Client to attach media
    
2. Update the server
   
   sudo apt-get -y update sudo apt-get -y upgrade

   1 2	sudo apt-get -y update sudo apt-get -y upgrade

3. Create the mount point
   
   sudo mkdir -p /media/cdrom

   1	sudo mkdir -p /media/cdrom

4. Mount the ISO
   
   sudo mount /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom

   1	sudo mount /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom

   
   You should see the message: mount: block device /dev/sr0 is write-protected, mounting read-only
5. Change Directory
   
   cd /media/cdrom

   1	cd /media/cdrom

6. Copy the tar file to your /tmp directory
   
   sudo cp VM*.tar.gz /tmp

   1	sudo cp VM*.tar.gz /tmp

7. Install Build tools if necessary
   
   sudo apt-get -y install linux-headers-server build-essential

   1	sudo apt-get -y install linux-headers-server build-essential

8. Change Directory
   
   cd /tmp

   1

   cd /tmp

9. Unmount the ISO
   
   sudo umount /media/cdrom

   1	sudo umount /media/cdrom

10. Expand the tar
    
    sudo tar xzvf VM*.tar.gz

    1	sudo tar xzvf VM*.tar.gz

11. Change Directory
    
    cd vmware-tools-distrib

    1	cd vmware-tools-distrib

12. To prevent a potential error in the install script on Ubuntu 11.10+, create a special directory
    Unable to create symlink “/usr/lib64/libvmcf.so” pointing to file ”/usr/lib/vmware-tools/lib64/libvmcf.so/libvmcf.so”.
    
    sudo mkdir -p /usr/lib64

    1	sudo mkdir -p /usr/lib64

13. Run the Install Script. The -d flag automatically answers the default to all questions. To customize it, just omit the -d.
    
    sudo ./vmware-install.pl -d

    1	sudo ./vmware-install.pl -d

14. Reboot
    
    sudo reboot

    1	sudo reboot

Let me know if this worked for you!
Also, please follow me on Twitter: @justinschier

This is "How to do Computing" for everyday usage ...

Manually uninstalling VMware Workstation from Linux hosts

Manually uninstalling VMware Workstation from Linux

VMWare Workstation doesn't ship in a deb, so it isn't registered in dpkg (which is why you can't find it in the software center). It does have an install and uninstall utility though.

To uninstall VMWare Workstation, you will need to run

#vmware-installer --uninstall-product vmware-workstation

Details

This article provides steps for manually removing VMware Workstation when the uninstaller script or RPM package fails to remove the product automatically.

Solution

Note: Log into the host using the root account to execute the terminal commands in this article. If running Ubuntu, the root account is not available by default. Prepend all commands with sudo,or switch to root using this command:

sudo su -

Warning: This command provides unrestricted access to the operating system. It is possible to cause damage to the system when using this access level.

1. Open a command prompt. For more information, see Opening a command or shell prompt (1003892). Type the commands as indicated in the steps of this procedure.
   
2. Shut down all VMware applications and services.
   
   /etc/init.d/vmware stop
   
   
3. Verify that all processes have stopped:
   
   lsmod | grep vm
   
   Note: A zero must be listed beside VMware related modules to indicate that they are no longer running.
   
   
4. Move the VMware libraries to the /tmp directory:
   
   cd /lib/modules/kernel_version/misc
mv vm* /tmp
   
   Note: If the kernel has ever been updated, you must check and move the files from multiple paths. Substitute the kernel version where indicated above.
   
   
5. Unload the kernel modules:
   
   rmmod vmnet.o
rmmod vmmon.o
rmmod vmci.o
rmmod vmblock.o
rmmod vmppuser.o
   
   
6. Remove the VMware startup scripts:
   
   RedHat and Most Distributions:
   rm /etc/rc.d/init.d/rc2.d/*vmware*
rm /etc/rc.d/init.d/rc3.d/*vmware*
rm /etc/rc.d/init.d/rc5.d/*vmware*
rm /etc/rc.d/init.d/rc6.d/*vmware*
   
   Ubuntu:
   
   rm /etc/rc2.d/*vmware*
rm /etc/rc3.d/*vmware*
rm /etc/rc5.d/*vmware*
rm /etc/rc6.d/*vmware*
   
   Note: If you are using a different Linux distribution, substitute the correct path in the commands.
   
   
7. Remove the remaining VMware files and directories:
   
   rm -rf /etc/vmware*
rm /usr/bin/vmware-usbarbitrator
rm /usr/bin/vmnet*
rm -r /usr/lib/vmware*
rm -r /usr/share/doc/vmware*
   
   
8. If an RPM package was used to install the VMware product, complete these steps to delete the RPM database entry:
   
   rpm -qa | grep VMware
   
   A list of VMware packages is presented. Copy the exact package name for the next step and paste it into the command where indicated.
   
   
9. Remove the VMware packages:
   
   rpm --erase --nodeps VMware_Package_Name

How do You Install XvidCap on uBuntu 12.04 Distro

Xvidcap is a small tool to capture things going on on an X-Windows display to either individual frames or an MPEG video. This software is not present in the Ubuntu 12.04 repository by default. You can get a copy of the distributed binary in the form of a .deb package at the following link.

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/precise/amd64/xvidcap/

Once you download this package, go ahead and install the package with the following command. The amd64 package given as example is for 64 bit machine.

$ sudo dpkg -i xvidcap_1.1.7-0.2ubuntu12_amd64

In case if the above command fails giving out errors, please note that Xvidcap depends on libavdevice-extra-53 package. So go ahead and install this package first with the following command.

$ sudo  apt-get install libavdevice-extra-53

By default, the Ubuntu 12.04 comes with libavcodec53 package. This conflicts with the  libavdevice-extra-53. In such a case, feel free to go ahead and replace the libavcodec53 package with libavdevice-extra-53. This satisfies the dependency requirement for Xvidcap.

Once done with setting dependencies, you can then install the Xvidcap package.

This is another posting showing "how to do computing" for everyday computer usages... For a general public 

How to add Swap Memory into uBuntu ..

Linux RAM is composed of chunks of memory called pages. To free up pages of RAM, a “linux swap” can occur and a page of memory is copied from the RAM to preconfigured space on the hard disk. Linux swaps allow a system to harness more memory than was originally physically available. 

However, swapping does have disadvantages. Because hard disks have a much slower memory than RAM, virtual private server performance may slow down considerably. Additionally, swap thrashing can begin to take place if the system gets swamped from too many files being swapped in and out.

Check for Swap Space

---

Before we proceed to set up a swap file, we need to check if any swap files have been enabled on the VPS by looking at the summary of swap usage.

swapon -s

An empty list will confirm that you have no swap files enabled:

Filename    Type  Size Used Priority

Check the File System

---

After we know that we do not have a swap file enabled on the virtual server, we can check how much space we have on the server with the df command. The swap file will take 512MB— since we are only using up about 8% of the /dev/sda, we can proceed.

df
Filesystem     1K-blocks    Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda        20907056 1437188  18421292   8% /
udev              121588       4    121584   1% /dev
tmpfs              49752     208     49544   1% /run
none                5120       0      5120   0% /run/lock
none              124372       0    124372   0% /run/shm

Create and Enable the Swap File

---

Now it’s time to create the swap file itself using the dd command :

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1024 count=512k

“of=/swapfile” designates the file’s name. In this case the name is swapfile. 

Subsequently we are going to prepare the swap file by creating a linux swap area:

sudo mkswap /swapfile

The results display:

Setting up swapspace version 1, size = 262140 KiB
no label, UUID=103c4545-5fc5-47f3-a8b3-dfbdb64fd7eb

Finish up by activating the swap file:

sudo swapon /swapfile

You will then be able to see the new swap file when you view the swap summary.

swapon -s
Filename    Type  Size Used Priority
/swapfile                               file  262140 0 -1

This file will last on the virtual private server until the machine reboots. You can ensure that the swap is permanent by adding it to the fstab file.

Open up the file:

sudo nano /etc/fstab

Paste in the following line:

 /swapfile       none    swap    sw      0       0 

To prevent the file from being world-readable, you should set up the correct permissions on the swap file:

sudo chown root:root /swapfile 
sudo chmod 0600 /swapfile