FreeBSD How To Install VMware tools

If you want to run FreeBSD on VMware, you might notice that some features are not working well, like the mouse, the screen resolution, or the shared folders. That’s because you need to install VMware Tools, which are a set of drivers and utilities that improve the performance and usability of your virtual machine.

This article will explain how to install VMware Tools on FreeBSD.
VMware tools are needed for some features. In addition, it will improve video and mouse performance for X-windows.
At this point, you have successfully installed FreeBSD. The only issue is the friendly yellow banner asking you to install the VMware tools.

 

 

After clicking on the install button you should see a message like this:

Do not worry, here we will look into ports after this, I hope you will be able to answer the following questions:

• What are ports?
• How to update ports?
• How to install /uninstall software using ports?

First, let’s look into the definition of ports from the FreeBSD wiki:

The FreeBSD Ports collection is a package management system for the FreeBSD operating system. As of February 2020, there are over 38,487 ports available in the collection. It has also been adopted by NetBSD as the basis of its pkgsrc system.

If you do not know anything about ports, no problem. Here is an article that explains the basics of how to install and manage ports.

Next, let’s install VMware tools.

root@test:/ # cdport open-vm-tools
root@test:/usr/ports/emulators/open-vm-tools # make install clean

Compiling and installing VMware tools will take some time. They have many dependencies and will require your input from time to time.

Enabling the Open VM Tools

After the install is complete, and there are no errors, we can enable the “open VM tools”.

To do that we need to edit /etc/rc.conf file

root@test:/usr/ports/emulators/open-vm-tools # edit /etc/rc.conf

In the rc.conf please add the following:

# Enable open-vm-tools
vmware_guest_vmblock_enable="YES"
vmware_guest_vmhgfs_enable="YES"
vmware_guest_vmmemctl_enable="YES"
vmware_guest_vmxnet_enable="YES"
vmware_guestd_enable="YES"
# end of open-vm-tools config

It is time to reboot the system for the changes to take effect.
Then shut down and power the virtual machine back up for VMware to recognize the changes.

This will allow FreeBSD to take advantage of features such as:

•  shared folders,
•  drag and drop,
•  time synchronization,
•  graceful shutdown.