VMWare Tools fails on CentOS 6.7 minimal with "initctl: Job failed to start"
I am posting this here because I struggled with this and ultimately found the solution elegantly saved in another website which is no longer up (wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20141017041537/http://www.utterlyforked.com/vmware-fusion-5-and-cent-6-4/)
I am using VMware Fusion 7.1.2 and I installed a CentOS 6.7 minimum build from an ISO, and then proceeded to Install VMWare Tools by clicking the Virtual Machine dropdown and selecting "Install VMWare Tools". Some installation guides suggest that a wizard will walk you through this but that's not the case, as the CD is not mounted automatically, so you have to go through mounting the drive and running the perl install script from the console or terminal prompt. The VMWare Help on this is very clear, for what it's worth:
mkdir /mnt/cdrom
mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
cd /tmp
tar zxpf /mnt/cdrom/VMwareTools-x.x.x-yyyy.tar.gz
umount /dev/cdrom
Perl needs to be installed, so:
yum install perl
Then, run the VMWare Installer:
cd vmware-tools-distrib
./vmware-install.pl
After powering through the defaults, I get:
...
Do you want to enable Guest Authentication (vgauth)? [yes]
No X install found.
Creating a new initrd boot image for the kernel.
vmware-tools-thinprint start/running
initctl: Job failed to start
Unable to start services for VMware Tools
Execution aborted.
Users have gotten past the initctl: Job failed to start message in a variety of ways, but in this specific case, the answer is very clear.
I'll post @ukandrewtaylor's answer below, copied shamelessly from the Internet Wayback Machine. If you're that Andrew from Utterly Forked, please claim your answer :-)
Answer
Just a really quick drive-by posting. I’m currently working the new Vagrant VMware provider. I thought I’d build a quick Cent6.4 basebox (more to come on this later) and I ran in to what I believe are a few quirks with VMware tools.
Please get in touch if I’m misunderstanding what’s going on here, but, I think that the latest version of VMware tools has some incompatibilities with an out-of-the box Cent build (perhaps just the minimal install which I always use).
Firstly:
When installing VMware-tools the first time around I was getting errors with
initctl: Job failed to start
Unable to start services for VMware Tools
There’s a few internet fingers pointed at the ThinPrint setup; I’m not using printing at all but I’m going to speculate that an install of CUPS and a few other things will fix this. I thought I’d just disable it but this is where if you’re new to CentOS 6.0 you’ll be confused and the internet won’t really help you.
As of 6.0 CentOS ships with upstart. You can google upstart vs sysvinit but for the purposes of fixing VMware tools, just remove /etc/init/vmware-tools-thinprint.conf:
rm /etc/init/vmware-tools-thinprint.conf
You should then be able to run:
/etc/vmware-tools/services.sh start
to start everything you’ll need and it should automatically via upstart next time you reboot. You’ll not see anything in chkconfig as the VMware tools daemon isn’t LSB compliant. You’ll know if everything is running as it should because you’ll get an output when you start vmware tools
Starting VMware Tools services in the virtual machine:
Switching to guest configuration: [ OK ]
VM communication interface: [ OK ]
VM communication interface socket family: [ OK ]
Guest filesystem driver: [ OK ]
Mounting HGFS shares: [ OK ]
Blocking file system: [ OK ]
Guest operating system daemon: [ OK ]
and you’ll see the running process
1959 ? Ssl 0:00 /usr/sbin/vmware-vmblock-fuse -o subtype=vmware-vmblock,default_permissions,allow_other /var/run/vmblock-fuse
1981 ? S 0:00 /usr/sbin/vmtoolsd
Secondly:
Blocking file system: [FAILED]
If you’re getting this when running /etc/vmware-tools/services.sh start it’s down to VMware now relying on the FUSE project libs which aren’t necessarily installed. Fix with
yum install fuse-libs
Hope this helps somebody.
Andrew