Nilesh D Kapadia

Update: VMWare Fusion 2.0.5 now supports Ubuntu 9.04. I recommend upgrading to 2.0.5 and installing the latest VMWare tools in your Ubuntu 9.04 guest, rather than following these instructions.
Update 2: Since upgrading to 2.0.5, I have been experiencing problems. Shutting down my Linux VM often causes VMWare Fusion to crash and once locked up my entire system, forcing me to hard boot and my Linux VM was corrupted in the process. I am reverting back to 2.0.4 for now, and have restored my Linux VM from a backup that I made before I upgraded to 2.0.5 which uses the VMWare Tools as modified in these instructions.

For an Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) guest, VMWare Tools does not work perfectly in VMWare Fusion 2.0.4 out-of-box (I had problems with mouse ungrab and window resizing, and the file sharing module doesn't even compile), but there is a way to get things working better. Someone at VMWare posted this blog which helped me get things working (along with the article and forum posting it linked to).

Here's what I did:

First uninstall any existing VMWare Tools if they exist:

sudo vmware-uninstall-tools.pl

Select install vmware tools and extract the file somewhere. As described in this blog, untar vmware-tools-distrib/lib/modules/source/vmhgfs.tar and rename it.

cd vmware-tools-distrib/lib/modules/source
tar xvf vmhgfs.tar
mv vmhgfs.tar vmhgfs.tar.backup

Edit vmhgfs-only/page.c (from the extracted archive) and find the following line:

page = __grab_cache_page(mapping, index);

And change it to:

page = grab_cache_page_write_begin(mapping, index, flags);

Create a new tar file:

tar cvf vmhgfs.tar vmhgfs-only

Switch back to the vmware-tools-distrib folder and run vmware-install.pl as root:

cd ../../..
sudo vmware-install.pl

I hit enter for all the questions to select the defaults (you may or may not). Do whatever you do when you normally run this script.

To get mouse ungrab working, I first uninstalled the xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse package:

sudo apt-get remove xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse

Then installed it again:

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse

Finally, I rebooted.

Everything seems to be working, though automatic screen resize is a bit flaky. Though full-screen works fine, without full-screen I can't get screen resize to use the maximize amount of space; it only uses up as much space as you would if you had the top button-bar enabled (which I don't). It also sometimes doesn't resize when I make the window bigger.