UPDATE ......From Tuesday 8 April 2025 we have changed the way that Single Sign-on works on this wiki. Please see here for more information:
Update
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The trick here is to use --no-install-recommends. The GUI tools are in the Recommends of the CLI tools (don't ask me), so installing the CLI tools with apt-get install open-vm-tools
will also pull down the X stuff.
This way everything seems to work just fine: