Installing and running open-vm-tools on Ubuntu

1. Built the VMWare appliance. Followed these excellent instructions. Used Ubuntu 7.10 desktop. Set up a 30GB virtual drive and a bridged network. Used 512MB.
   
2. Figured out that USED to have to use the VMWare Workstation to install the tools on your VMWare appliance if you've not got the tools on the guest. BUT VMWare just this September made the tools open source and you can build your own. Downloaded the source here. Droped the source directory into my home directory and built there.
   
3. Read the README. Ran configure and make as instructed.
4. Anytime I got an error, I read the message and figured out what libraries were missing. Then I went and found those and used apt-get install to install them. At the bottom of this post I've listed a bunch of libraries I had to install. If you don't know how to use apt or the package manager for your system, go buy and read the "Linux Phrasebook" by Scott Granneman. Scott covers both Debian apt, Red Hat RPM, and YUM.
   
5. Got to the point where I had everything built without errors in an open-vm-tools directory. After some experimentation ran the following 2 commands from the root of the build directory to get the seamless mouseover and copy-paste to work between the VM appliance and the Windows XP host. (Which is the main reason I wanted to install the tools.)
   

$ sudo vmware-user/vmware-user &
$ sudo guestd/guestd &

Hope this helps!

Following are some of the package dependencies. (From: http://forum.compiz-fusion.org/archive/index.php/t-755.html )

# core dependancies (for stable/development)
sudo apt-get install build-essential libxcomposite-dev libpng-dev libsm-dev libxrandr-dev libxdamage-dev libxinerama-dev libstartup-notification0-dev libgconf2-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libglu1-mesa-dev

# for gtk (also installs cairo-dev)
sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev libwnck-dev

# for metacity
sudo apt-get install libmetacity-dev

# for svg (--enable-librsvg)
sudo apt-get install librsvg2-dev

# for dbus
sudo apt-get install libdbus-1-dev libdbus-glib-1-dev

# for fuse
sudo apt-get install libfuse-dev

# for gnome-integration
sudo apt-get install libgnome-desktop-dev libgnome-window-settings-dev

# additional things needed for downloading/compiling from git
sudo apt-get install gitweb curl autoconf automake automake1.9 libtool intltool libxslt1-dev xsltproc