Unable to create a symbolic link when installing VMware Tools in Linux

Products

• VMware Desktop Hypervisor

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

When installing or updating VMware Tools in a Linux virtual machine, there may be these symptoms:

• Symbolic links do not get created
• There may be these errors:
  • Unable to create symbolic link "/usr/lib/vmware-tools/bin"
  • Unable to create symbolic link "/usr/lib/vmware-tools/libconf"
  • Unable to create symbolic link "/usr/lib64/libvmcf.so"

Environment

VMware Workstation
VMware Workstation Pro
VMware Workstation Player

VMware Player Pro
VMware Player

VMware Fusion Pro
VMware Fusion

Cause

This issue occurs if the installer fails to remove the existing directory before attempting to create a symlink.

Resolution

To resolve this issue, manually remove the existing directories and then run the VMware Tools installer again.

To remove the directories:

# sudo rm -rf /usr/lib/vmware-tools/libconf
# sudo rm -rf /usr/lib/vmware-tools/bin

To resolve the error Unable to create symbolic link "/usr/lib64/libvmcf.so", manually create the /usr/lib64 directory:

 

# sudo mkdir /usr/lib64

 

For more information on installing VMware Tools, see General VMware Tools installation instructions (1014294)

 

For more information on using a compiler, see Installing VMware Tools in a Linux virtual machine using a Compiler (1018414)

Additional Information

How to install VMware Tools
Installing VMware Tools in a Linux virtual machine using a Compiler