Installing VMware Tools on Ubuntu 18.04 Desktop and Location of Ifconfig Program

I recently installed Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on my lab machine running Windows 10 Professional with VMware Workstation 14 Pro virtualization software… One of my guest machines is running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS… When you’re running 18.04 as a guest machine, you may run into this issue when trying to install VMware Tools on the guest…

The issue is, the VMware installation can’t find the location of the ifconfig program on your system… and probably this will be resolved when the final version of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is released…

However, if you want to install the tool to today on 18.04 guest machine… you may see this..

“What is the location of the “ifconfig” program on your machine?”

This tutorial shows students and new users what to do when they encounter this message

Step 1: Locate the ifconfig on Ubuntu

Since you may likely be asked the above question about the location of the ifconfig program, prior to installing VMware Tools, use the commands below to locate the ifconfig program…

If mlocate isn’t already installed, (should be installed by default)… run the commands below to install..

sudo apt-get install mlocate
sudo updatedb
sudo locate ifconfig

Then use the commands below to locate the ifconfig program…

sudo mlocate ifconfig

You should see something like this:

/usr/src/linux-headers-x.xx.x-xx/tools/hv/hv_set_ifconfig.sh

During the installation, then prompted to locate ifconfig, choose yes and specify the location above.

This will allow the installation to complete.

Step 2: Install Net-tools on Ubuntu

Although net-tools isn’t supported anymore on Ubuntu and has been retired… you can still install it to resolve VMware Tools issues….

So, prior to install VMware Tools, run the commands below to install net-tools…

sudo apt install net-tools

After installing, go and restart VMware Tools installation… and this time it should complete without errors…

So, Step 1 and 2 are both useful methods to resolve this nagging issues… however, if you have to choose, go with step 1… since net-tools isn’t supported on Ubuntu anymore and probably shouldn’t installed…

That’s it!

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