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This brief blog entry will note the steps, reason, & links I followed to install VMWare Tools in a Windows XP Guest without using VMWare Workstation. The host machine is Ubuntu Linux and the application being used is plan ol' FREE VMWare Player (VMPlayer). First, what is VMWare Tools? "VMware Tools is a suite of utilities that enhances the performance of the virtual machine’s guest operating system and improves management of the virtual machine by your VMware product. It is very important that you install VMware Tools in the guest operating system. Although a guest operating system can run without VMware Tools, you lose important functionality and convenience."

Greatly increase the speed of WinXP virtual machines

With the VMware Tools SVGA driver installed, Workstation supports significantly faster graphics performance. The VMware Tools package provides support required for shared folders and for drag and drop operations. Other tools in the package support synchronization of time in the guest operating system with time on the host, automatic grabbing and releasing of the mouse cursor, copying and pasting between guest and host, and improved mouse performance in some guest operating systems.

Users of VMWare Workstation and such paid products can simply click VM > Install VMware Tools from the Workstation menu, yet if your a frugal hacker that creates virtual systems using Qmenu this workstation guide isn't going to cut it. Then what?

First, we need the set-up files... A quick google search for the latest "VMware-workstation-6.0.2-59824.i386.tar.gz" is one way to go about it. Download the torrent and extract vmware-distrib/lib/isoimages/windows.iso.

Or... Download from folks already hosting the 28M file (md5sum: ad4d1b71d2f5d3a8fc83af915149fecd)

[coolcode]wget http://www2.mm2d.net/pub/VMWare/vmware-tools/windows.iso[/coolcode]

Extract and port over to your windows (or simply download the file in windows).

[coolcode]mkdir setup
mount -o loop windows.iso setup
ls -lah setup/[/coolcode]

Run the setup.exe (In your windows guest)

VMWare Tools for Windows XP Guest (Image)

~Fin with installation and as promised, VMWare Tools has greatly increased the speed of my Windows XP virtual machine.

Is this legal? After all, these tools seem to be a bit hidden from non-paying users. No worries...

Ben at communities.vmware.com writes: VMware does not place any licensing restrictions on the use of the VMware Tools. The whole idea with Player is that you can take a VM (with the VMware Tools installed) and distribute it however you like.

(Obviously, it's up to you to make sure you are in compliance with the OS licensing for any VM that you use or distribute.)

Currently Player does not support the installation of the VMware Tools in virtual machines, since the expectation is that Player will be primarily used for running VMs created with one of our other products (and thus the Tools will already be installed). Adding support for Tools installation in Player is a feature we could consider for a future release, but for the time being it is not supported.

As far as VMware is concerned, it is not "cheating" to replace the OS in an existing VM with another OS. It's up to you to make sure you are properly licensed for whatever OS you install.

Thanks to brandonhutchinson.com for the windows.iso location and mm2d.net for hosting the files in user-space.