Installing VMware (Fusion) Tools for Ubuntu 13.04

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.

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