How to: Fix Ubuntu VMware Tools vmhgfs Compile Failure

Update: https://github.com/rasa/vmware-tools-patches can fix ubuntu 15.04 compile problem while the metod below did work on 14 version only.

While trying to compile support for vmware shared folders on ubuntu with vmware-config-tools.pl you can get the following error

  CC [M]  /tmp/modconfig-8FzHSB/vmhgfs-only/inode.o
In file included from /usr/src/linux-headers-3.13.0-48-generic/arch/x86/include/asm/percpu.h:44:0,
                 from /usr/src/linux-headers-3.13.0-48-generic/arch/x86/include/asm/preempt.h:5,
                 from include/linux/preempt.h:18,
                 from include/linux/spinlock.h:50,
                 from include/linux/mmzone.h:7,
                 from include/linux/gfp.h:4,
                 from include/linux/mm.h:8,
                 from include/linux/pagemap.h:7,
                 from /tmp/modconfig-8FzHSB/vmhgfs-only/inode.c:29:
/tmp/modconfig-8FzHSB/vmhgfs-only/inode.c: In function ‘HgfsPermission’:

and so on..

Quick and tested fix:

#!/bin/sh -x
cd /usr/lib/vmware-tools/modules/source
tar xf vmhgfs.tar
grep -q d_u.d_alias vmhgfs-only/inode.c && echo "already patched" && exit 0
sed -i -e s/d_alias/d_u.d_alias/ vmhgfs-only/inode.c
cp -p vmhgfs.tar vmhgfs.tar.orig
tar cf vmhgfs.tar vmhgfs-only
vmware-config-tools.pl

You can copy and paste the above lines in a .sh file to execute or run all commands line by line.