Trying to install VMWare tools from packages.vmware.com/tools repository in Ubuntu but getting a error while installing packages? There seems to be package dependency going back to open-vm-tools-kmod-generic but it doesn’t exist. When you try to install the next level of package, it would say

“PreDepends: vmware-open-vm-tools-kmod-… but it is not installable”

Unfortunately the VMWare Installation Guide isn’t clear on this matter whereas the Ubuntu documentation is much better. It shows that you can either use the open source version directly available via apt-get or you can build the kmod (kernel mods) from source using the source files in the VMWare repository.

Spooler simply stops every time you try to print or add a printer or something? You can keep restarting it but will never be able to print something? I won’t pretend to know your problem since it depends on potentially so many things but if you have a MacBook, one thing worth investigating is have you been running VMWare Fusion? The ThinPrint drivers of the VMWare Tools seem to be able to cause this problem when you run the same machine in BootCamp mode. Unfortunately, you can’t just uninstall it. Uninstalling VMWare Tools from inside virtual mode seems to solve this problem