Install Official VMware Tools on Arch Linux.

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.

Reference: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/VMware/Installing_Arch_as_a_guest#Shared_Folders_with_vmhgfs-fuse_utility

https://github.com/rasa/vmware-tools-patches