VMware Tools on Mac Silicon VM

I created a new VM running Slackware on my MacBook M4. Here's how to install VMware Tools to have dynamic screen resoultion and copy/paste working.

Dependencies / prereqs

First, we need dependencies from slackbuilds.org. I'm using sbopkg (https://sbopkg.org)

sudo sbopkg -i libmspack
sudo sbopkg -i xmlsec

The .pc-file for libmspack needs to be symllinked to /usr/share/pkgconfig:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/pkgconfig/libmspack.pc /usr/share/pkgconfig/

Installation

Download latest vmtools from https://github.com/vmware/open-vm-tools/releases The latest version for me is 13.0

wget https://github.com/vmware/open-vm-tools/releases/download/stable-13.0.0/open-vm-tools-13.0.0-24696409.tar.gz
tar zxvf open-vm-tools-13.0.0-24696409.tar.gz
cd open-vm-tools-13.0.0-24696409
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install

Configuration

Make vmtoolsd start at boot:

sudo echo /usr/bin/vmtoolsd --background=/run/vmtoolsd.pid >> /etc/rc.d/rc.local

For copy and paste to work, the logged in user needs to run vmware-user

vmware-user &

In KDE Plasma, you can easily add it as an autostart application:

Shared folder

To share a folder with the host you can do the following:

First, activate sharing and select a folder on the Mac:

Create folder in the VM e.g:

sudo mkdir /mnt/hgfs

Edit /etc/fstab and add something like this:

vmhgfs-fuse /mnt/hgfs fuse defaults,allow_other,_netdev 0 0

Mount:

sudo mount /mnt/hgfs/

The mount is persistent - thanks to the entry in fstab - and survives reboots. That's all!