There are many pages on this, but they are not all careful to distinguish WHICH set of vmware tools they are describing. There are two sets that are quite different:
- The apt package open-vm-tools (and open-vm-tools-desktop)
- The VMware tools installed from the VMWare menu (via a CDROM)
Note also that the content of #1 has changed, and vmware-hgfsmounter no longer exists. I am using VMware Fusion 8.1.1 and Ubuntu 16.04.
To install #2 you must first do "apt-get purge open-vm-tools open-vm-tools-desktop". When you do that and run the installer from the CDROM, it says to use open-vm-tools. If you ignore that and install them, you'll get lots of compiler errors on vmhgfs (the kernel module that implements shared folders in Linux), and it will fail.
I went several times around the loop switching between the two types of VMware tools until I stumbled on a solution:
Use open-vm-tools (for me they just came when I installed Ubuntu 16.04). Reboot. In the VMware settings (on the host):
- disable shared folders
- enable shared folders
- delete any folders
- add back the folders you want
Now they are there for me, in /mnt/hgfs. But they disappear on reboot -- disabling and enabling shared folders (in VMware Fusion settings) brought them back. I could not figure out what to put into /etc/fstab, so after each reboot I must disable/enable them.
Can anyone tell me how to make them survive a reboot?
(I would have added this to one of the other pages, but this system won't let a new user like me do that. I'm new here, not to Linux or VMwarL.)