I am testing Ubuntu Lucid Beta1 this week on our ESX 3.5 servers.
The VMware tools have been an issue forever, for various reasons:
- Ubuntu kernel upgrades render the binary VMware shipped modules unusable
- Official VMware tools lag behind
The open source Open-vm-tools are good, and with the recent addition of the dkms system it is possible to recompile the modules on a abi-bumping kernel upgrade.
As of today (April 1, no joke) there seems to be an annoying dependency problem in the Ubuntu provided open-vm-tools packages. This means that apt-get will always install the entire X11 system.
This is not what most server admins want - they want the minimal set of CLI tools.
I was able to work around this by recompiling open-vm-tools without all those dependencies. The resulting open-vm-toolbox package is then broke, but I don't need that anyway. The open-vm-tools package seems to work just fine.
At least my VSphere is happy with it and recognize it. (pics here)
It looks like using the server install ISO also install the whole X11 stuff - which is not what you'd expect on a server. I managed to get a bare install by using the alternate ISO, then using F4 from the boot menu (install command line system).
Finally found how to correctly install open-vm-tools on Lucid:
- Install Lucid
- apt-get dist-upgrade
- reboot
- apt-get install -no-install-recommends linux-headers`uname -r` open-vm-dkms open-vm-tools
The trick here is to use --no-install-recommends. The GUI tools are in the Recommends of the CLI tools (don't ask me), so installing the CLI tools with apt-get install open-vm-tools will also pull down the X stuff.
This way everything seems to work just fine:
