VMware tools installation (Shared Folders) on Arch Linux
I'm using VMware Workstation 10.0.1 and Windows 7 32 bit. I'm trying to install VMware Tools on Arch Linux to Share Folder between Windows host and Arch Linux guest.
Here is the details of my machine uname -a
Linux archlinux 3.18.2-2-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Fri Jan 9 07:23:08 CET 2015 i686 GNU/Linux
I've tried to install VMware tools in various ways. Every time it installs successfully but only the Shared Folder feature didn't work. Neither the vmware supplied hgfs module nor the hgfs module from the open-vm-tools compiles on my machine.
I've tried both Official VMware Tools and Open-VM-Tools from Installing Arch Linux in VMware. But no luck.
I've also tried the patch from GitHub here to automate the process. But nothing changed.
I've also tried this patch got from another question on StackOverflow here
Here is in brief what I've done,
I've tried to install all the dependencies needed for Official VMware Tools and Open-VM-Tools. For this reason I've installed
# pacman -S base-devel net-tools linux-headers
and also installed aurget to install community packages. Then,
For installing Open-VM-Tools
# pacman -S open-vm-tools
$ aurget -S open-vm-tools-dkms // installed as regular user not root
# cat /proc/version > /etc/arch-release
# systemctl enable vmtoolsd.service
# reboot
For installing Official VMware Tools
# cd /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/build/include/linux
# ln -sv ../generated/uapi/linux/version.h
# for x in {0..6}; do mkdir -pv /etc/init.d/rc$x.d; done
# mount /dev/cdrom /mnt
# cd /root
# tar zxf /mnt/VMwareTools*.tar.gz
# cd vmware-tools-distrib
# ./vmware-install.pl
# systemctl reboot
After rebooting and logging in,
# /etc/init.d/rc6.d/K99vmware-tools start
Then I've created a folder on my D:\xshare and added this to the machine by menu
VM --> Settings... --> Options --> Shared Folders
Then created a directory on the system
# mkdir /home/archuser/xshare
After that trying to share the folder between host and guest temporarily running this command
# mount -t vmhgfs .host:/xshare /home/archuser/xshare
Error: cannot mount filesystem: No such device
But getting error.
There is an instruction on the Arch installation page to solve this by running this but I'm also getting error here
# modprobe vmhgfs
modprobe: FATAL: Module vmhgfs not found.
Please help me to solve this issue. Thanks in advance.
Answer
I had the same issue. I solved applying a patch to the official VM tools. I was on a Mint (debian-based distro) box, so I don't know if you can use the same procedure on Arch, but I think that you can easily adapt it.
I followed the steps suggested here, and in particular those indicated in Jorge's comment, that is:
$ git clone https://github.com/rasa/vmware-tools-patches.git
$ cd vmware-tools-patches
$ ./patched-open-vm-tools.sh
Good Luck!