VMWare tools install failure. Unable to find "depmod" progam

I am getting the following error when running vmware-install.pl.

Setup is unable to find the "depmod" program on your machine. Please make sure it is installed. Do you want to specify the location of this program by hand?

I'm running this as root when this occurs. Prior reading has led me to believe that depmod should be in /sbin/depmod, but it is also not there.

VM Software: VMware Workstation

HOST: Windows 10

Guest: debian-10.1.0-386

Any advice or solutions would be appreciated.

Solution 1:

As per https://www.howtoforge.com/vmware_tools_on_linux

Install the required tools:

apt-get install autoconf automake binutils cpp gcc linux-headers-$(uname -r) make psmisc

Solution 2:

depmod and other tools are found inside /sbin/. After entering these paths manually when the install script asked for them, it showed me that I should instead use the open-vm-tools packages, see http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2073803

This in turn led me to https://github.com/vmware/open-vm-tools/blob/master/README.md which eventually made me realize that they're talking about a package I can install with apt-get:

apt-get install open-vm-tools

and

apt-get install open-vm-tools-desktop

After running both, and then rebooting, my VM's screen size finally adjusts to the VM's window size and Copy & Paste works as well.