Installing VM Tools in OEL

I recently setup an Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 virtual machine in a VMware.  Unfortunately, the VMware tools wouldn't install cleanly.  While researching this issue, I found that some people encountered the issue with  both OEL5 and OEL6.  However, I haven't tested it with OEL6 yet.

Below is what I had to do to resolve the issue.

1. Install the latest update of Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.

2. Download and enable Oracle's public yum service.

      wget -qO - http://public-yum.oracle.com/public-yum-el5.repo|sed \

       -e "s/enabled=0/enabled=1/g" > /etc/yum.repos.d/public-yum-el5.repo

3. Install the requisite packages to compile the VMware tools

      yum install -y kernel-uek-headers-`uname -r` gcc kernel-uek-devel

4. Extract the VMWare tools

      tar --gunzip -xf /media/VMware\ Tools/VMwareTools-*.tar.gz

5. Attempt to compile the VMware tools

      cd vmware-tools-distrib/bin

      ./vmware-install.pl

           Agree to all of the default settings except the display settings.  

           For that, I selected the number that corresponds to 1024x768.  

           This was just my preference.

If you happen to get an error similar to "No module ehci-hcd found for kernel", then you will need to append the $content variable to build the had modules by editing the bin/vmware-config-tools.pl and add the red line in the following excerpt.

    foreach my $key (@gRamdiskModules) {

      if ($style eq 'redhat') {

        $content .= " --with=" . get_module_name($key) . "  ";

        $content .= " --builtin=ehci-hcd --builtin=ohci-hcd \
           --builtin=uhci-hcd ";

      } else {

        $content .=  get_module_name($key) . ' ';

      }

    }

Once that fix is applied, re-run ./vmware-install.pl and then restart the VM to enable copy/paste.