Comment 19 for bug 776103

Nate, I wish I was more than a newcomer; I'd gladly help you, since I am getting obsessed to an unhealthy and unnatural degree with making VMware work from am end-user perspective. I realize this is sick ;-)

If I weren't so frustrated that the Debian "package maintainers" seem to be indifferent, absent, clueless, or just paralyzed, I wouldn't have reached out to my Ubuntu brothers. Debian has had grave bug reports for at least four months on their totally obsolete, supposedly "latest" version of Tools and hasn't even classified any of them. Much less uploaded a new package to unstable or experimental.

So I was reaching out to you in desperation; I had you pegged as someone actively working to get a solution I could steal.

So while I'm sorry for treading on your ppa, I *have* successfully installed ppa9 in a "semi-Oneiric" Natty (basically a 3.0.1 kernel with as much of the internals and build infrasturucture upgraded as I can without breaking my desktop, which is fragile because, of course, VMware doesn't support direct-rendering in linux guests). DMKS built all modules without any problems whatsoever.

I would like only to observe that distro package maintainers have to look thought the eyes of the recipient to ensure that end-users will have a good experience. This is what I mean:

* Even if shared folders are always enabled in the host, the guest will not auto-mount them. Timing issues in loading the necessary modules makes using fstab problematic.

* Drag and Drop operations from the *host* to *guest* will fail because the open-vm-tools initialization does not seem to provide the necessary environment, and once created, that environment is volatile, since VMwareDnD has to be created in \tmp.

After doing some reading, I've modified the startup section of my /etc/init.d/open-vm-tools as follows (I make no claim about knowing what I'm doing, or that it is sufficiently general):

log_daemon_msg "mounting hgfs shares"
  mount -t vmhgfs .host:/ /mnt/hgfs
  log_end_msg 0
if [ ! -d /tmp/VMwareDnD ]
  then
   log_daemon_msg "making a directory on the guest to store files for DnD"
   mkdir /tmp/VMwareDnD
   chmod 1777 /tmp/VMwareDnD
   log_end_msg 0
fi
log_daemon_msg "mounting vmblock for DnD"
mount -t vmblock none /proc/fs/vmblock/mountPoint
log_end_msg 0

Source: http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/open-vm-tools/index.php?title=Packaging