Recently (not so recently now because I’m a slow blogger) I was installing, or rather attempting to install, the VMware Tools into a virtual machine running Ubuntu 13.04, and I ran into a bit of trouble. This may happen to you too.
First you’ll see this problem:
Searching for a valid kernel header path…
The path “” is not a valid path to the 3.5.0-26-generic kernel headers.
Would you like to change it? [yes]Enter the path to the kernel header files for the 3.5.0-26-generic kernel?
Clearly no path (“” <— note the lack of… anything) cannot be correct. But how do you find the correct path?
The kernel header path in question should be under /usr/src/[your current kernel version]/include. Of course you’ll need to know your current kernel version. You can find this by running uname -r (it will return something like linux-headers-3.5.0-26-generic). So this is the answer to the above question:
/usr/src/linux-headers-3.5.0-26-generic/include
This may yet fail if the headers were not installed alongside the kernel. Sweat not, little piggies! Enter this command to install the proper headers:
sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r)
Once that install finishes you can hop back over to the Tools installation and insert the above path once again.
The path “/usr/src/linux-headers-3.5.0-26-generic/include” is not a valid path
to the 3.5.0-26-generic kernel headers.
Would you like to change it? [yes]Enter the path to the kernel header files for the 3.5.0-26-generic kernel? /usr/src/linux-headers-3.5.0-26-generic/include
The path “/usr/src/linux-headers-3.5.0-26-generic/include” appears to be a
valid path to the 3.5.0-26-generic kernel headers.
Would you like to change it? [no]
I hope that helps you get where you want to be.
I tested this on the latest (unstable) release from Elementary OS (20130810) and it didn’t work. Sorry, EOS users. Maybe someone else has an answer.