Resolving no shared folders with VMWare Player 7 and Ubuntu 15.04 guest

VMWare Player is actually a very nice stable virtualisation solution … for older operating systems.

If you are using VMWare Player to experiment with newer operating systems like Ubuntu 15.04 you’ll find out quite quickly, standard stuff like vmware-tools fail to work.  The reason for this is that VMWare themselves are not proactive.  They wait months and months before releasing newer versions of their vmware-tools product.

If you want a pro-active hypervisor – choose virtualbox.  However – I’ve found that virtualbox is very unstable – it often crashes and suspending & resuming guests just doesnt work.

So back to VMWare Player.

Shared folders support for the latest Ubuntu 15.04 using the current vmware-tools (v9.9.2) is broken.  If you attempt to install vmware-tools, a whole host of vmhgfs compilation errors are observed.

Fortunately there is a wonderful GitHub Project that maintains support for new kernels – support for both kernel 3.19 and kernel 4.0 is available.

The readme instructions are self explanatory.  Reproduced here – but remember to re-read the readme for changes and updates – don’t forget to show your appreciation and star that repository and use the briliant Flattr to show your support:

To build VMware Tools, do the following:

1. Checkout the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/rasa/vmware-tools-patches.git

2. Copy or download the version of VMware Tools you wish to use into the vmware-tools-patches folder. To do this use download-tools.sh and pass it the associated VMWare Fusion version number N.B. this still works with VMWare Player!!:

   cd vmware-tools-patches
   ./download-tools.sh 7.1.1

   It is strongly suggested to use the latest version of VMware Tools.

   VMware Tools is also included inside the linux.iso file that is shipped with VMware Fusion, Player, and Workstation – but you should ignore this version and just grab the latest.

3. Untar the tarball, and apply the patches:

   cd vmware-tools-patches
   ./untar-and-patch.sh

4. Run the vmware-install.pl installer to install VMware Tools:

   ./compile.sh