Installing VMWareTools on Debian Lenny

Not officially supported, requires some tweaking of the version of gcc used.

Basic process, not annotated

 

apt-get install binutils cpp gcc make psmisc linux-headers-$(uname -r)

mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/

tar -C /tmp -zxvf /mnt/VMwareTools-x.x.x.tar.gz

umount /mnt

ln -sf /usr/bin/gcc-4.1 /usr/bin/gcc

cd /tmp/vmware-tools-distrib
./vmware-install.pl
 
ln -sf /usr/bin/gcc-4.3 /usr/bin/gcc

reboot

For details, see the source from this blog.