I am very happy to announce that Dmitry Torokhov has joined the open-vm-tools team! Dmitry is probably known best in the community for his work maintaining the linux kernel's input subsystem. We are very excited about having someone with his skills and expertise join the team and are looking forward to his contributions to the project.

For those of you who do not follow the -announce mailing list, you may have noticed that the svn link on the sourceforge project page has disappeared. This is because we have moved to using git for managing the project's source. The git repository is located git.opensource.vmware.com/opensource/open-vm-tools/ . We would love to hear from you on how well (or not) this is working for you.

We have released a new version of the open-vm-tools project today. A lot of effort has gone in to this release to specifically address bugs and other requests from the community. Here is a high level list of the major changes.

• Kernel modules for FreeBSD, including an experimental port of HGFS to FreeBSD.
• The vmsync driver on Linux to make VM snapshots consistent.
• As some of you have noted, we missed adding the xferlogs utility and a few other utility scripts in our previous release. This release includes these scripts.
• Various other bug fixes throughout the code.
• We have also worked on making sure the code builds on a wider variety of systems.

You can download the code here or alternatively, get it via subversion. As always, please use the tracker and/or mailing lists if you find bugs, have questions or feature requests. Enjoy!

We have posted a development snapshot that fixes a couple of bugs on the sourceforge download page. Specifically, this fixes a couple of bugs.

• The nox patch fixes bug 1796805 Cannot configure without X libraries.
• The ubuntu patch fixes a bug where some mtab manipultion macros were not evaluating to (void) and the compiler was complaning.

We are also working on bug 1805476 and should have updates on this front in the coming days.

And oh, the subversion repository is now up and running. We are still working on our contributor agreement and once that is done, we should be able to start accepting patches and such.

We would like to acknowledge all the efforts that are going in to package open-vm-tools for various linux distributions. Here are a couple that we are aware of:

• The Gentoo folks have been making some steady progress.
• The debian package is now available as part of the contrib repository in experimental.

If you are working on packaging up open-vm-tools for another distro and are running into any issues, please let us know through our mailing list or bug tracker.

We know its been a while, but better late than never, eh? :) Here is a link to the presentation we gave announcing the release of open-vm-tools. It contains some good information about the project, the goals and a high level overview of the various components.