I’ve been using VMware Player at work to run Groundwork which is a pretty neat network monitoring system — but more on that in another post. So one thing that was getting annoying was the guest OS (the one running on the virtual-ized system) had been losing time. I didn’t check how often but in the course of an hour it would be off by about 20 minutes at least. I knew of the vmware-tools package that was supposed to help the virtual OS run a little better and thought that would help it get the time as well. I also thought the tools were already installed but wasn’t sure. I tried looking in the Add/Remove programs but didn’t find it so I decided to move to the command line.
$ locate vmware
was enough to list quite a few files which was encouraging. I eventually found the vmware-tools in /usr/bin directory. I then ran the vmware-toolbox program and the first option I saw was “Time synchronization”. Exactly what I wanted. Now when i receive alerts about the network, the time will actually be correct. And my OCD is satiated as well.