Monday, December 9, 2013

VMWare Tools Failed to Load on Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy)

I am running a Ubuntu guest OS using VMWare Player. I upgraded my guest Ubuntu to Ubuntu 13.10 through "do-release-upgrade" and upgraded my VMWare player to 6.01. When I was upgrading the VMWare Tools, I encountered a problem that the VMWare Tools cannot be loaded. I did a quite a few web searches and many suggested to disable the vmware-tools-thinprint service. On my guest, it did not help by disabling the vmware-tools-thinprint service. What actually helped was to upgrade vmxnet to vmxnet3, which can be accomplished by directly editing the virtual machine's configuration file. To edit the configuration file, in my case the Ubuntu.vmx file, add a line to the file, e.g.,


ethernet0.virtualDev = "vmxnet3"


The solution was hinted by the error message when I ran vmware-install.pl,


The vmxnet driver is no longer supported on kernels 3.3 and greater. Please 
upgrade to a newer virtual NIC. (e.g., vmxnet3 or e1000e)

In some case, as indicated by the comment below, you may also need to uninstall (by running vmware-uninstall-tools.pl that should have been installed, by default at the /usr/bin directory) and reinstall VMWare tools.

4 comments:

  1. That was not enough for me. I had to uninstall vmware-tools and reinstall it. After that, it recognized the vmxnet3 driver and stopped complaining.

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  2. Thanks a lot for letting me know. Let me update the post.

    ReplyDelete
  3. This was a big help, many thanks!

    ReplyDelete