kali linux 2016.1 vmware tools not working

[cassidyc]

I recent performed the upgrade to Kali rolling, however I cannot get the vmware tools to work. As per the instructions:

apt-get update
apt-get install open-vm-tools-desktop fuse
reboot

instead after reboot I do not have access to the VMware shared drives, screen resizing does not work, nor does the copy/paste.

Upon bootup I see the following errors:

[FAILED] Failed to mount VMware vmblock fuse mount
see 'systemctl status "run-vmblock\\x2dfuse.mount"' for details.

and

[FAILED] failed to start LSB: VMWare Tools service.
See 'systemctl status vmware-tools.service' for details.

so doing that we get:

systemctl status "run-vmblock\\x2dfuse.mount"
● run-vmblock\x2dfuse.mount - VMware vmblock fuse mount
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/run-vmblock\x2dfuse.mount; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: active (mounted) (Result: exit-code) since Fri 2016-02-05 10:55:18 GMT; 1min 55s ago
    Where: /run/vmblock-fuse
     What: vmware-vmblock
     Docs: https://github.com/vmware/open-vm-tools/blob/master/open-vm-tools/vmblock-fuse/design.txt
  Process: 353 ExecMount=/bin/mount vmware-vmblock-fuse /run/vmblock-fuse -t fuse -o subtype=vmware-vmblock,default_permissions,allow_other (code=exited, status=255)

and

systemctl -l status vmware-tools.service
● vmware-tools.service - LSB: VMware Tools service
   Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/vmware-tools; bad; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Fri 2016-02-05 10:55:18 GMT; 2min 26s ago
     Docs: man:systemd-sysv-generator(8)
  Process: 484 ExecStart=/etc/init.d/vmware-tools start (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE)
   CGroup: /system.slice/vmware-tools.service
           ├─909 /usr/sbin/vmware-vmblock-fuse -o subtype=vmware-vmblock,default_permissions,allow_other /var/run/vmblock-fuse
           └─927 /usr/sbin/vmtoolsd

Any pointers where I can look for more details and/or what to do to fix.

I have tried removing and re-installing the vm tools and fuse

Thanks

[Rambozo]

I was having the same problem on clean new installation of Kali 2016.1.
I tried both open-vm-tools and vmware-tools, each on a newly created system. In each case, the tools installed and didn't report any obvious errors, however none of the features worked - e.g. I couldn't resize guest window, copy/paste, etc. VM tools installation has been pain in the *** in most previous Kali versions that I tried, as far as I remember.

I finally gave up and downloaded pre-built VM image with 2016.1 version. Guest sizing in it works out of the box; it comes with open-vm-tools. I am not sure if that helps in your case, but I can post configuration files and logs - I am just not sure what exactly to look for.