EDIT

The vmaretools iso image must be made available to the guest system as cdrom.

apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r)

echo "copy this path for later, just in case the vmware-config-tools.pl cand find it:"
echo /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/build/include


mount /dev/sr0 /mnt
cp /mnt/VMwareTools-9.0.0-782409.tar.gz /tmp/
umount /dev/sr0
cd /tmp/
tar xzf VMwareTools-9.0.0-782409.tar.gz
vmware-tools-distrib/vmware-install.pl 

/etc/init.d/vmware-tools status

if you run into problems where ... can not find the linux headers:

Turns out, the installer is looking for the version.h file in under path/include/linux/version.h, it's not there. The location of version.h is pathinclude/generated/uapi/linux/version.h

The solution is a symlink:

sudo ln -s /usr/src/linux-headers-$(uname -r)/include/generated/uapi/linux/version.h /usr/src/linux-headers-$(uname -r)/include/linux/version.h

After creating this symlink, I was able to run the VMware Tools installer without a problem.

from http://askubuntu.com/questions/131351/how-to-install-vmware-tools )