How to install VMWare tools on CentOS 5.0

VMWare tools are needed for a smooth integration between the guest and host OS. I'm currently using VMWare Fusion for Mac, and I needed CentOS for a project. Here are the steps I went through:

In CentOS do yum install gcc kernel-devel

Compare the version of OS, reported by the uname -r with that of kernel headers, reported by rpm -q kernel-devel. If there's a mismatch, update the headers with yum -y upgrade kernel kernel-devel and reboot.

In WMware Fusion go to the Virtual Machine menu -> Install VMware Tools. 

In CentOS do a mount /dev/cdrom /mnt. Now you should have a gzipped tar with the tools in /mnt. Extract them into the /tmp folder with tar -C /tmp -zxvf /mnt/VMwareTools*.tar.gz

cd /tmp/vmware-tools-distrib

./vmware-install.pl and follow the prompts.