I forget these steps all the time, so I figured I should record them here.
A lot of times VMWare will auto-install the VMWare tools for you when you first setup your VM. However, many times after setting it up I’ll do updates, and updates to the kernel will be applied, knocking out the VMWare Tools changes. These tools are used for things like file sharing between the guest and host.
So here are the steps to take to fully update and re-install the VMWare Tools. I got most of these from an article on Ubuntu’s website.
First, sudo aptitude update to make sure all my repository information is up-to-date.
Second, sudo aptitude safe-upgrade to get any and all updates for my newly installed OS.
Third, sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-`uname -r` psmisc to install the linux headers for my kernel.
Fourth, copy and install the VMWare Tools:
# make a mount point if needed :
sudo mkdir /media/cdrom
# Mount the CD
sudo mount /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom
# Make a dir for the VMWare Tools files
mkdir ~/vmtools
# Copy and extract VMWareTools
sudo cp /media/cdrom/VMwareTools*.tar.gz ~/vmtools
# You can extract with archive manager, right click on the archive and extract ... or
cd ~/vmtools
tar xvf VMwareTools*.tar.gz
# Install the tools
cd vmware-tools-distrib
sudo ./vmware-install.pl
Just follow the prompts and hit for all the default values.
Justin Carmony 
shortcut…
sudo aptitude install open-vm-tools open-vm-dkms open-vm-toolbox-
Reasons:
* simpler
* no need to run vmware-config-tools.pl after every kernel upgrade
* managed by your package manager
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