Install open-vm-tools on Debian 4.0 (Etch)
Posted by Admin on September 18th, 2008
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Note: It is important to keep the order of this steps as written below – otherwise your network will be disabled! Make sure you’re executing this steps locally and not via an SSH session, as the network connection will be interrupted at the end when loading the modules!
Add the etch-backports repository to your sources.list
#echo “deb http://www.backports.org/debian etch-backports main contrib non-free” >> /etc/apt/sources.list
Update your local repository cache using the following command
#apt-get update
Install some prerequisites for building the kernel modules provided by open-vm-source
#apt-get install build-essential autotools-dev libdumbnet-dev libgtk2.0-dev libicu36-dev libpam0g-dev libproc-dev libx11-dev libxinerama-dev libxtst-dev linux-headers-$(uname -r)
Install open-vm-source
#apt-get install open-vm-source
Run the package build process using ‘modules assistant’
#m-a open-vm
Install the generated modules
#m-a install open-vm-source
Now install the open-vm-tools
#apt-get install open-vm-tools
Restart your network interface(s)
#/etc/init.d/networking restart


October 6th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
Actually you need to install just module-assistant (apt-get install module-assistant) and then run m-a a-i open-vm
Module-assistant will install all the needed software and will build the required modules.
It could be useful, also, to install the repository GPG key by issuing the command
apt-get install debian-backports-keyring