While I agree that SparkyLinux is a very nice lightweight Sid, I still cannot complete the installation of vmware-tools under kernel version 3.9. It seems to spit out less errors but still throws a killer 'bad variable name':
/etc/init.d/vmware-tools:1118: local: ':bad variable name
The execution then aborts and vmware tools fails for me. Great shame as I quite like 'Sparky' (thanks for that)
Although timesync starts vmware-tools, a reboot throws out a pile of init.d bad variable name messages and shared folders etc fail to work.