I was doing a vSphere 5.0 to 5.1 upgrade in my home lab tonight and ran into a small issue with upgrading VMware Tools on a Linux VM. During the install I received an error message ‘Unable to create symlink “/etc/cups/ppd/VMware_Virtual_Printer.ppd” pointing to file “/usr/lib/vmware-tools/configurator/thinprint.ppd”. Execution Aborted.’
It seemed that CUPS was already present on the server I was upgrading – CUPS is an open source software for modular printing in Unix-like systems. VMware tools leverages CUPS for ThinPrint / Virtual Printers in Linux systems. Because the /etc/cups directory existed, the vmware-config-tools.pl script could not create a symbolic link in the /etc/cups directory.
To correct the issue, I simply created the ppd directory in /etc/cups as follows:
mkdir /etc/cups/ppd
Then I re-ran the ./vmware-install.pl from the vmware-tools-distrib directory for a successful upgrade of VMware tools to the latest version.
If you are looking for additional help with installing and configuring the VMware Tools package on Windows, Linux (including Ubuntu apt, RedHat RPM, or other distributions using Compiler), Novell, or Solaris, see VMware KB article 1014294.
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