If you’re running Ubuntu 22.04 inside a VMware virtual machine, installing the VMware Tools software will help you get the most out of the system. VMware Tools will give the machine more capabilities, such as a shared clipboard with the host system, drag and drop file transfer, and automatic window resizing. In this tutorial, you will see how to install VMware tools on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux VMware virtual machine.
In this tutorial you will learn:
- How to install VMware tools
- How to check whether VMware tools are loaded

Category | Requirements, Conventions or Software Version Used |
---|---|
System | Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish |
Software | VMware Tools |
Other | Privileged access to your Linux system as root or via the sudo command. |
Conventions |
# – requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command$ – requires given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user |
Install VMware tools on Ubuntu 22.04 step by step instructions
- The chances are that the VMware tools are already installed in your Ubuntu 22.04 virtual machine. If this is not the case you can open a command line terminal and install the VMware tools using the following commands. Select a single command to fit your installation:
# UBUNTU 22.04 SERVER: $ sudo apt install open-vm-tools # UBUNTU 22.04 DESKTOP: $ sudo apt install open-vm-tools-desktop open-vm-tools
- After installation, reboot your Ubuntu 22.04 virtual machine for the changes to take effect.
$ reboot
- Check for loaded VMware tools modules to confirm the installation:
$ lsmod | grep vmw
Closing Thoughts
In this tutorial, we saw how to install VMware Tools on an Ubuntu 22.04 VM. VMware Tools makes virtual machines much easier to use. Although Ubuntu 22.04 usually includes the software by default, this doesn’t always work perfectly in the real world. You now know how to manually install the software, and can begin to control its other features from inside the VMware menus.