Thursday, 24 January 2008

Starting VM tools automatically and hiding to systray

This is nothing to do with surgery, but rather acting as an aide memoir for me:

After installing vmware tools in a linux guest it is nice for the tool box to start automatically. The way to do this is to add vmware-toolbox to the start-up application list usually found under Program->Settings->Sessions.

The command line is:
/usr/bin/vmware-toolbox --iconify
or /usr/bin/vmware-toolbox --minimize

Note that the usage string for vmware-toolbox lists --inconify as the option which is spelt wrong and doesn't work.

Better still the application can be minimized to the system tray using a little app called alltray. Alltray is in the universe repo for gutsy ubuntu and is installed with 'sudo apt-get install alltray' or go to http://alltray.sourceforge.net/

Then modify the above to:
alltray /usr/bin/vmware-toolbox --iconify
to get vmware-toolbox auto started and minimised to the systray.

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