Installing VMWare tools on FreeBSD 6.2

For those of you like myself that have a laptop with newer hardware that FreeBSD does not recognize, VMWare may be a good solution for you. FreeBSD 6.2 works very will under VMWare workstation 6 as the guest operating system. One this that doesn’t get installed by default are the vmware tools.

This article describes how I have installed the vmware tools (v 6.0) under FreeBSD 6.2

Before Installation

Check to see if your system has perl installed.  Most FreeBSD installs do as this is the default.

# perl -v

If perl is not installed, then install the package.

# pkg_add -r perl

Installing the Tools

Make sure you have FreeBSD installed and working as a guest first.

From the VMware workstation menu go to VM -> Install VMware Tools
From the FreeBSD guest OS mount the virtual CDROM

# mount /cdrom

Extract the VMware tools to /tmp

# tar -C /tmp -zxvf /cdrom/vmware-freebsd-tools.tar.gz

Unmount the virtual CDROM drive

# umount /cdrom

Now run the VMware tool installer

# cd /tmp/vmware-tools-distrib
# ./vmware-install.pl

When asked “Do you want to run vmware-config-tools.pl?” , answer “Yes”.

The VMware tools are now installed.