The

open-vm-tools

provided by Linux distrubutions meet the need of many users. Users can update their

open-vm-tools

from the package repository provided by a Linux distribution. The install instructions vary depending on the package management system used by a Linux distribution. Sometimes another package repository can be configured to install a newer version from the OS vendor. For detailed instructions, refer to the documentation of the OS vendor.

In general,

open-vm-tools

is supported for OSs that use three different package management systems:

Ubuntu, Debian and Related OSes from this family use apt to install Debian (*.deb) packages
Red Hat, Fedora and CentOS use dnf or yum to install RPM (*.rpm) packages
SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) and openSUSE use zypper to install RPM (*.rpm) packages

All distributions split the package into a system and a desktop component. The desktop component is useful on systems that have a graphical UI (X11, Wayland, and so on). The package names are

'open-vm-tools'

and

'open-vm-tools-desktop'

. SLE and openSUSE ship another package

'libvmtools'

as a dependency. The package management system automatically installs this dependency when

'open-vm-tools'

or

'open-vm-tools-desktop'

are installed.