It’s painful to install VMware tools on Arch linux but hopefully this guide will make your life easier.
First the good people at https://github.com/rasa/vmware-tools-patches have already provided us with a simple way to install the tool.
Just:
$ git clone https://github.com/rasa/vmware-tools-patches.git
$ cd vmware-tools-patches
$ sudo ./patched-open-vm-tools.sh
Then you need to enable vmware-vmblock-fuse systemd service for the folder sharing function:
sudo pacman -S asp
asp checkout open-vm-tools
cd open-vmtools/repos/community-x86_64/
makepkg -s --asdeps
sudo cp vm* /usr/lib/systemd/system
sudo systemctl enable vmware-vmblock-fuse
sudo systemctl enable vmtoolsd
Then reboot your VM
systemctl reboot
Try it out if it works!
Bonus: If you want to add a share folder into your system
Open the Settings for the virtual machine, enable the Shared Folders feature and add a new folder into the software. Your setting menu will look like this:
Next you need to check if the folder is visable to the system entering:
vmware-hgfsclient
The command should show up any folder you shared to the system. Next we need to mound the folder to a location in your system.
We need to create and mount the folder using this command, <shared folders root directory> is the file path you wanna mount to and <shared_folder> is the folder name of your shared file.
mkdir <shared folders root directory>
sudo vmhgfs-fuse -o allow_other -o auto_unmount .host:/<shared_folder> <shared folders root directory>
Or if you want to auto mount the folder on boot up (start up) add a new line to the /etc/fstab file
.host:<shared_folder> <shared folders root directory> allow_other,uid=1000,gid=1000,auto_unmount,defaults 0 0
Then it will automaticaly remount on start up.