Cannot install vmware-tools

Question

I encounter this error:

The path /usr/src/linux/include is not an existing directory.

Hi there are still issues as listed below. Please advise

ronald@ronald-virtual-machine:~/Desktop/vmware tools/vmware-tools-distrib$ sudo ./vmware-install.pl
[sudo] password for ronald:

A previous installation of VMware Tools has been detected.

The previous installation was made by the tar installer (version 4).

Keeping the tar4 installer database format.

You have a version of VMware Tools installed. Continuing this install will 
first uninstall the currently installed version. 
Do you wish to continue? (yes/no) [yes]

Error: Unable to execute "/usr/bin/vmware-uninstall-tools.pl.

Uninstall failed. Please correct the failure and re run the install.

Execution aborted.

ronald@ronald-virtual-machine:~/Desktop/vmware tools/vmware-tools-distrib$ chmod +x /usr/bin/vmware-uninstall-tools.pl

chmod: cannot access `/usr/bin/vmware-uninstall-tools.pl': No such file or directory

Answer 1

It appears that vmware is trying to uninstall the older version before installing the newer one, but is failing to do so.

1. I would manually uninstall the old version of vmware tools by typing the following command into the terminal:

   sudo apt-get remove vmware
   

Note: the word "vmware" is just a guess as to what the name of this package is. If this gives you an error like "Unable to locate package" then try changing the word vmware to whatever you think the package name is.

1. Once vmware is unstalled, try installing the newer package.

Answer 2

This also happened to me when I interrupted vmware tools upgrade. it seems, the first thing the upgrade does is delete all files in the system. the uninstall script being the first one and that's why you can't find it.

I don't understand why the installation gets interrupted+ if the uninstall script is not found (for me, that's just a bad decision), but the mounted device comes with its own script which you can use to delete everything. a simple

locate vmware-uninstall

outputed its location and for me it was in

/home/my_username/Desktop/vmware-tools-distrib/bin/vmware-uninstall-tools.pl

For you, the only difference should be ronald instead of *my_username*. Hope that helps.