I recently did some work with Debian Etch virtual machines which I downloaded from the good people at thoughtpolice. Here are my notes on getting the VMWare tools added to that machine.

To be able to do anything interesting with a virtual machine, you need to install the VMWare tools onto the virtual machine. With the virtual machine, choose to “Install the VMWare tools” – this does a virtual equivalent of putting the right CD into the machine and you can then mount the CD and run the install program (follow the instructions on the VMWare site, they probably update theirs). I found that under Debian Etch I needed to first use aptitude to install some additional things that the tools needed to get themselves set up. These were:

• gcc
• psmisc
• binutils
• make
• the kernel sources for the relevant version – do linux-headers-$(uname -r) to get the right version.

Then run the VMWare tools installation and everything should go through smoothly. If you installed VMWare tools but didn’t get all the setup completed because libraries were missing, you can just re-run the vmware-config-tools.pl script ( in /usr/bin/ for me).