Question: I just installed Mint 18 as a virtual machine using VMware 12. I have the problem that I can't install vmware-tools. At first I tried to install open-vm-tools as is recommended by Mint, but it didn't work, so I uninstalled it and then tried to install the default vmware-tools, but it can't be installed.

[![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/7hW6C.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/7hW6C.png)

Answer: 
Forget VM tools, use:

```
sudo apt-get install open-vm-tools open-vm-tools-desktop

```

Then do a full restart and check that the client screen will resize when the host window resizes.
I installed Linux Mint 19.1 (Tessa) onto VMware ESX 5.5 in a virtual machine, allocating 30g HDD, 2g memory, (resource manager shows Mint using 10g HDD and 900k memory).

After installing the VMwareTools (to get a bigger screen), I got a message saying that "Cinnamon desktop has crashed, would you like to restart it".
If you say Yes, then it crashes again in few seconds, if you say No, then it reverts to a simpler desktop (not sure what).

So, I did some hunting and found "open-vm-tools-desktop" and installed it, (after disabling VMwareTools at startup), and now Cinnamon stops crashing.

Here's what you do - (you need to install the package in the "/" root directory as root) -

1. **sudo su**
2. **cd /**
3. **sudo apt-get install open-vm-tools open-vm-tools-desktop**
4. **reboot**