FIXED: VMware Workstation Shared Folders don't work

The current release of VMware Tools fails to compile its Shared Folders (HGFS) module on Ubuntu 14.04 guest VMs.

It seems that VMware has failed to keep their code up-to-date with routine updates to the Linux kernel for some months.

Solution:
1. Take a snapshot of your VM guest in case step 2 goes wrong...
2. Patch the VMware Tools source code in your VM guest...

#!/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 

This works for VMware Workstation 11.1.0 build-2496824 with the 3.16.0-41-generic kernel on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS x86_64.

Sources: https://github.com/rasa/vmware-tools-patches
https://github.com/rasa/vmware-tools-patches/issues/29