Open-vm-tools is a sourceforge project to reimplement VMware Tools as open source. Their express goal is to be able to support more Guest OSes than is currently available, mainly related to other linux distros.
The project does not provide any packages, but only a source tarball, and that is updated around once a month. You can find some people out there who provide Debian and SUSE packages. I on the other hand use Fedora, CentOS and FreeBSD, so I started to package it myself.
After learning about the requirement for vmware tools in using VNC to get to the graphics console (see this article), I checked out if there was an April release and there was. When I got the March release (2009.03.18), I could not get it to compile on any version of Solaris. So I hurriedly compiled the package for CentOS 5.3 and Fedora 5, 8 and 10, and upgraded the VMs. Next, I was going to work on compiling for Solaris.
I had not started the Solaris compiles when I noticed some strange behavor on my VMs. vmtoolsd seemed to respawn quite frequently. This behavor was so bad that, on multiple VMware servers, the CPUs were pegged. Once I downgraded the packages, all was well again. Guess I’ll have to wait until the end of this month to see if I can get any success on Solaris. The release notes for 2009.04.23 were somewhat promising.
You can find the RPM packages at https://repos.tusk.tufts.edu, under the extras repository.
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