Installing Parallels Tools in CentOS 6 on El Capitan

I am using Parallels Desktop 11 for Mac OS X to run other operating systems on my Macbook Pro. This works fine for Windows 8 – I have no need for Windows 10 yet. This also works fine for Ubuntu. For a Big Data specialization on Coursera organized by the San Diego Supercomputer Center I need to use the Quickstart Virtual Machine with Hadoop installed and configured. This VM is based on CentOS.

I downloaded the VMWare version which can be perfectly imported in Parallels but I ran into an issue with installing Parallels Tools. The graphical installer only gave a vague error, but the command line installer clearly stated it missed some kernel-devel-2.xxx module.

These two commands made the error go away after which Parallels Tools on CentOS were installed correctly:

1. yum install kernel
2. yum install gcc kernel-devel

The first one may be sufficient, but came to me after I already did the other one (which did not solve the error).

In summary, use the command line installer for Parallels Tools, if you get the error try command 1 and if that is not sufficient, try command 2 as well. And reboot!!

Good luck!