Since I’ve wasted way too much time with this problem, I thought I’d share how I solved it…
But first the problem:
I wanted to install the vmware tools in a Debian Squeeze virtual machine. So I chose Install VMWare Tools in VMWare Workstation. Then mounted the CD:
mount /dev/cdrom
Unpacked the tools to the /tmp directory:
cd /tmp tar xvfz /media/cdrom0/VMwareTools-8.8.4-743747.tar.gz
I then started the tools installation:
cd vmware-tools-distrib/ ./vmware-install.pl
Most of it went fine but I reached the point where the installer looks for gcc and got the following message:
Searching for GCC... The path "" is not valid path to the gcc binary. Would you like to change it? [yes]
I said yes, looked for the path to gcc and saw it wasn’t installed. So I stopped the installer and installed gcc:
# apt-get install gcc
I restarted the installer and same problem… I now checked the path to gcc:
# which gcc /usr/bin/gcc
And entered it at the prompt:
What is the location of the gcc program on your machine? /usr/bin/gcc The path "/usr/bin/gcc" is not valid path to the gcc binary. Would you like to change it? [yes]
So gcc is now there but somehow the tools installer doesn’t like it.
After googling for ages, I ended up installing the following packages:
- make
- gcc-4.3
- libglib2.0-0
- linux-headers-2.6.32-5-amd64
Of course if you have another kernel, you should install the appropriate version of the Linux kernel headers. You can install it all like this:
aptitude install make gcc-4.3 linux-headers-`uname -r` libglib2.0-0
gcc-4.3 is required and not the version 4.4 which got installed when I ran apt-get install gcc because it’s the version which was used to compile the kernel. You can check this on your system using:
# cat /proc/version Linux version 2.6.32-5-amd64 (Debian 2.6.32-45) (dannf@debian.org) (gcc version 4.3.5 (Debian 4.3.5-4) ) #1 SMP Sun May 6 04:00:17 UTC 2012
After that the installation of the vmware tools was at last successful.
I’m not 100% sure that all 4 packages are needed but in the end after installing all 4 it worked and I really don’t want to test the different combination with 3 packages to see whether I could have installed one package less.
Thank you Henri, I had the same problem installing VMware Tools in my Debian Wheezy install, but after following your instructions I was able to fix the “gcc problem”.
Serg
Thanks! Extremely helpful tip!
Thank you very much. I had the same problem and while I had seen some of the commands round and about I loved the clear explanation.
Glad I could help make things clearer !
It works!
I tried installing:
make
gcc-4.3
libglib2.0-0
but it doesn’t work. When I looked at my linux version on /proc/version and then installed the linux-headers-X.X.X-version worked for me!
Thanks man!
This is indeed quite tricky and took me some time to figure it out.
Great tips. Thank you very much.
if you receive following messages:
Searching for a valid kernel header path…
The path “” is not a valid path to the 3.2.0-4-amd64 kernel headers.
Would you like to change it? [yes]
The solution to this is to install the necessary kernel headers and re-run the vmware-tools install script.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential
sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r)
Enjoy!
Gracias, me ayudaron las opciones de instalar gcc y los kernel headers y sus rutas.
Muchas gracias.
Thanks this was really helpful!