Bug 990547

I had kept intentionally to make "Shared Folders" work by adding just the kernel driver. However, I will look into removing it if you insist.

I just started testing Fedora 19 (Design Suite) as a VMware Player guest. As far as I can tell, Shared Folders does *not* work. My desired behavior is that it does work. I haven't tried erasing open-vm-tools and installing VMware Tools via the host, and quite frankly, I don't want to do that - I want open-vm-tools to work including shared folders.

(In reply to Ravindra Kumar from comment #1)
> I had kept intentionally to make "Shared Folders" work by adding just the
> kernel driver. However, I will look into removing it if you insist.

What's involved in adding the kernel driver?

What would it take to get the kernel driver upstream?

(In reply to Richard W.M. Jones from comment #3)
> (In reply to Ravindra Kumar from comment #1)
> > I had kept intentionally to make "Shared Folders" work by adding just the
> > kernel driver. However, I will look into removing it if you insist.
> 
> What's involved in adding the kernel driver?
> 
> What would it take to get the kernel driver upstream?

It's in the VMware Tools if you install them from VMware Workstation or VMware Player. *However*:

1. I don't know about licensing, and
2. The last time I tried to install into a guest machine running Fedora 19 with the latest kernel, the compile failed.

If the licensing is acceptable, I can re-run the compile and post the errors here or on the VMware forum, although I'm guessing it's already up there and a patch available.

Ok, I will be removing this file from packaging. Here are the answers to the questions asked above.

(In reply to M. Edward (Ed) Borasky from comment #2)
> I just started testing Fedora 19 (Design Suite) as a VMware Player guest. As
> far as I can tell, Shared Folders does *not* work. My desired behavior is
> that it does work. I haven't tried erasing open-vm-tools and installing
> VMware Tools via the host, and quite frankly, I don't want to do that - I
> want open-vm-tools to work including shared folders.

If you want to use "Shared Folders", you need to either use VMware Tools or build open-vm-tools from the source code published on SourceForge (http://open-vm-tools.sourceforge.net/).

(In reply to Richard W.M. Jones from comment #3)
> What's involved in adding the kernel driver?

Adding a kernel driver might not work when there are kernel patch updates. So, ideal solution is to upstream the driver with kernel.

> What would it take to get the kernel driver upstream?

Upstreaming requires two things at least:
1. Acceptance for a new filesystem driver by kernel maintainers (this becomes questionable for "Shared Folders" in presence of NFS and Samba clients)
2. A high quality and very stable driver

(In reply to M. Edward (Ed) Borasky from comment #4)
> It's in the VMware Tools if you install them from VMware Workstation or
> VMware Player. *However*:
> 
> 1. I don't know about licensing, and

I'm not sure which licensing you are referring to. However, if you install VMware Tools, it will ask you to remove open-vm-tools. This will change in future.

> 2. The last time I tried to install into a guest machine running Fedora 19
> with the latest kernel, the compile failed.
> 
> If the licensing is acceptable, I can re-run the compile and post the errors
> here or on the VMware forum, although I'm guessing it's already up there and
> a patch available.

Again, I'm not sure what licensing you are referring to. However, if you have any driver compilation errors or issues with VMware Tools, you need to take those with VMware forum instead of this bug. If you hit a compilation issue with open-vm-tools then you will have to take that to open-vm-tools forums on SourceForge (http://open-vm-tools.sourceforge.net/).

open-vm-tools-9.2.3-10.fc19 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 19.
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/open-vm-tools-9.2.3-10.fc19

These builds contain the fix:
Fedora 19 - http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=455341
Rawhide - http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=455340

open-vm-tools-9.2.3-6.el6 has been submitted as an update for Fedora EPEL 6.
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/open-vm-tools-9.2.3-6.el6

open-vm-tools-9.2.3-6.fc18 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 18.
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/open-vm-tools-9.2.3-6.fc18

Package open-vm-tools-9.2.3-10.fc19:
* should fix your issue,
* was pushed to the Fedora 19 testing repository,
* should be available at your local mirror within two days.
Update it with:
# su -c 'yum update --enablerepo=updates-testing open-vm-tools-9.2.3-10.fc19'
as soon as you are able to.
Please go to the following url:
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2013-14571/open-vm-tools-9.2.3-10.fc19
then log in and leave karma (feedback).

open-vm-tools-9.2.3-6.fc18 has been pushed to the Fedora 18 stable repository.  If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.

open-vm-tools-9.2.3-10.fc19 has been pushed to the Fedora 19 stable repository.  If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.

open-vm-tools-9.2.3-6.el6 has been pushed to the Fedora EPEL 6 stable repository.  If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.