Comments on: Debian Lenny & VMware Tools

By: Moving to a new medium; Big Iron - /dev/blog0

Moving to a new medium; Big Iron - /dev/blog0 — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 12:48:14 +0000

[...] also found that a lot of people were having the same issue as me and posted a reply on another blog about what I found :debian, Linux, [...]

By: bdk

bdk — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 11:38:33 +0000

Sounds like a lot of you are using sudo when trying to install vmware-tools which on the face of it is a good thing. Sudo’s default option of ‘env_reset’ strips the running of the command down to just PATH, HOME, TERM, SHELL, LOGNAME, USER and USERNAME which means that CC is also stripped. There are ways to set sudo to include certain variables, check the man pages for more details.

To quickly install vmware tools either negate the ‘env_reset’ option in your sudoers file ‘!env_reset’ or su/sudo -s to root, set the variable and then run the install script without using sudo.

The other method discussed of moving the symlink to gcc-4.1 and then back again when you’re done installing works as well but it not a long term fix and not really the root issue, sudo’s default behaviour is. Learn how sudo works.

This might not fix Joep’s kernel problem, hopefully others can learn from it though.

Guest OS: Debian Lenny 2.6.26-2-amd64
Vmware 6.5 Wks – VMTools-7.8.5-156735

By: Shoop

Shoop — Mon, 18 May 2009 12:18:20 +0000

It’s just a symlink to gcc-4.1 not the real directory on /usr/bin so if there’s a problem once you did that you can always delete the symlink again and re-create it pointing at gcc-4.3 …

By: j.piscaer

j.piscaer — Sat, 16 May 2009 15:39:17 +0000

Shoop,

Deleting files from /usr/bin manually is never a good idea. Those files are usually managed by you package manager. Deleting GCC is a really, really bad idea, because it is one of the core programs on a Linux machine.

By: Shoop

Shoop — Fri, 15 May 2009 13:52:15 +0000

try deleting the symlink gcc pointing gcc-4.3 and create one pointing gcc-4.1
in /usr/bin
# rm gcc
# ln -s gcc-4.1 gcc

It worked for me

By: John

John — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 09:07:40 +0000

Yes, i was doing it in 2 different sessons, my bad

By: j.piscaer

j.piscaer — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 14:21:09 +0000

@John: if vmware-config-tools.pl is still complaining after exporting CC, you’ve done something wrong.

By: John

John — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 13:46:34 +0000

export CC=/usr/bin/gcc-4.1 didnt work for me. It still complained about using gcc 4.3.2
So i tried the symlink solution instead, and that worked fine

By: j.piscaer

j.piscaer — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 14:20:03 +0000

Terry,

I’m not making any symlinks in the article. Running ‘export CC=etc’ should do the trick, as I already posted in this blogpost.

By: j.piscaer

j.piscaer — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 14:17:50 +0000

justinas: the vmware tools are actually the same across all latest released versions of ESX, Workstation, Server and Fusion. There shouldn’t be a great difference in performance.

By: Terry Rankine

Terry Rankine — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 00:18:56 +0000

dont to the simlink…..

vmware installer honours the environment variable – CC

so
export CC=/usr/bin/gcc-4.1 ./vmware-intsall.pl or vmware-config-tools.pl

By: justinas

justinas — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 15:31:12 +0000

according to my opinion, using vmware tools v2 on vmware 3guest is not good idea because of performance.

how about it?
can you see any difference?

By: Rodrigo Miguel

Rodrigo Miguel — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 00:48:13 +0000

Yo !
I got the same problem with VMware Server 2.0.0 build-122956, its got a simple solution, install gcc 4.1 and change your symbolic link

# apt-get install gcc-4.1
# rm /usr/bin/gcc
# ln -s /usr/bin/gcc-4.1 /usr/bin/gcc