The Sentinel

All of the help I could find for setting up Ubuntu in a VM (using VMware Fusion on my Mac) assumes you’re using the Desktop version, with all the pretty Gnome/Nautilus crap prettiness. In case anybody else gets stuck trying to install the VMware Tools (to provide useful features like access to your host (Mac) filesystem and clipboard sharing), here’s the steps:

1. In Fusion, select Virtual Machine | Install VMware Tools... menu option. This option emulates a CDROM being inserted, but without Nautilus your guest OS won’t do anything until you…
2. Mount the CDROM by typing sudo mount /dev/cdrom /mnt (substitute /mnt if you want the mount point to be elsewhere)
3. cd /mnt (or wherever your mount point was)
4. cp VMwareTools* ~/ to copy the archive to your home directory
5. cd to move yourself to that home directory
6. umount /mnt to unmount the CDROM
7. tar zxf VMwareTools* to uncompress the archive
8. cd vmware-tools-distrib to get into the contents
9. And finally, sudo ./vmware-install.pl to run the installer

At this point the installer will walk you through the options; I just accepted all the defaults.

To turn on shared folders, go to the Virtual Machine | Shared Folders menu and configure from there. The vmware tools daemon should detect the changes and make those folders appear under /mnt/hgfs (which stands for Host Guest FileSystem).

Good luck.
/m