Pete's Log: The path "/usr/bin/gcc" is not valid path to the gcc binary.
Entry #1741, (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)(posted when I was 33 years old.)
VMware Player recently prompted me to upgrade to version 4.0.0 build-471780. The upgrade went fine, but then of course when I next booted my Debian VM, I was informed my VMware Tools were out of date. So I told VMware to install the new version. But things were not as easy as expected. The VMware Tools that tried to install were VMwareTools-8.8.0-471268.tar.gz. The first few steps ran fine, but when it came time to compile the kernel modules, I was given the following error message:
The path "" is not valid path to the gcc binary.
Strange. gcc is installed. So I manually entered the path to gcc, but that only changed the error:
The path "/usr/bin/gcc" is not valid path to the gcc binary.
Bizarre. Google eventually led me to this VMware forum thread in which Deryni provided the correct answer:
apt-get install libglib2.0-dev
I didn't need it for the previous version of VMware Tools, but this version wants it. No useful error message from the Tools installer, but things work now.
I was going to add a post to the thread thanking Deryni, since there seemed to be a bit of doubt that this was the correct solution. But before they would allow me to post, VMware wanted me to fill in a whole bunch of mandatory information about my company and such, and I didn't want to do that. So instead, I'll have to post my thanks to Deryni here and hope that by linking to his post, I'm (ever so slightly) increasing its google page rank.