>> If it's Linux, then this never, ever, under any circumstances, works.
>> It's /supposed/ to work; they provide Linux-compatible packages. They
>> just don't /work/.
>
> No, it would be accurate for you to say that you've never gotten it to
> work.

OK, fair enough. But I doubt I'm the only person having this trouble.

So on Windows, they support at least Windows NT 4. So VMware Tools is 
probably an NT4-compliant application, which would therefore also work 
under later OSes. They might have had to write more than one version of 
some of the device drivers, and get the installer to pick the right one. 
But there's less than half a dozen possibilities to consider.

For Linux... well, last time I visited Distro Watch, there was well over 
a hundred entries. And that's just the number of distros; each point 
release of a distro is more or less incompatible with all over point 
releases of that same distro. That gives us a combinatorial explosion of 
/thousands/ of possible combinations.

Naturally, VMware aren't going to test against all of them. Certainly 
they aren't going to produce binaries that work against all of them. 
Indeed, producing binaries at all seems kind of pointless; they will 
almost never match the guest OS.

And so, inevitably, when you try to run the installer script, it says it 
doesn't have any modules that match the running kernel. The next thing 
it says is "would you like to try compiling it yourself?" So OK, let me 
just install a C compiler and a few other bits... Right, go for it.

What? What do you mean no kernel headers? OK, let me go install those. 
What do you mean they "don't match" the running kernel? I got them from 
the right repo... OK, well, proceed anyway. What? GCC doesn't match the 
version used to build the kernel? How do you even /know/ that?? And, uh, 
why is the version you want not even listed as an option in any repo for 
any release of this distro?

IIRC, I did get this stuff to actually compile and install once. But 
after completing the install and rebooting the guest as requested, the 
software /still/ didn't actually work. (Presumably there's some way 
somewhere of determining whether it's even running, but I don't know 
what that is.)



In other news, my new employer is apparently paying for me to get Linux 
Professional Institute Certified...

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