Although when you I tried to enable the guest additions using the suggested open-vm-tools, it doesn’t run correctly and I’ve been unable to use shared folders between the host and guest in order to copy some files.

I accordingly used the legacy vmware-tools, and voila! everything worked fine!

My Setup:

• Host: Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily)
• Guest: Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS Server
• Hypervisor: VMWare Workstation 12 Pro

Prerequisites:

1. Install the following packages: build-essential, linux-image-virtual, linux-headers-virtual
2. create a directory /mnt/hgfs
3. Right-click the settings on the VM -> Options -> Shared Folders and enable Folder Sharing and add a folder to be shared between the host & guest

Install the VMWare Tools:

1. start the VM, then from the top menu click VM -> Install VMWare Tools. This should attach the VMWare Tools CD to the VM
2. Mount the VMWare Tools CD: “sudo mount /dev/cdrom /media/username/cdrom”
3. copy the “VMware-Tools-xxxx” to any folder and extract it
4. Navigate to the created folder: “cd vmware-tools-distrib” and install: “sudo ./vmware-install.pl”
5. Accept all the defaults
6. Reboot!

Mount the shared folder:

1. “sudo mount -t vmhgfs .host:/ /mnt/hgfs”

That’s it! Enjoy!