I finally was able to get VMware server to install, mostly due to a very helpful forum post on ubuntu’s forums. Once I found this post I knew I was 90% there because it was specifically dealing with both the version of ubuntu and the version of VMware server I was trying to install. When I went to follow the instructions though I still ran into a little snag. In all fairness this little snag was because I had already borked my system when I tried to install vmware with the RPM.
When I went to run vmware-install.pl I received a message that said previous installation found, and then it bombed out. Sorry I didn’t think to copy and paste the exact message so you’ll have to deal with my summary. Using strace (thanks for the tip Rob) I was able to figure out that it was looking in /etc/vmware and found some remnants of the last install. Once I removed /etc/vmware I was able to follow the instructions on the forum post without any problems.
For the most part the instructions on the forum are pretty self explanatory. Although steps 2 and 5 are particularly helpful. Step 2 tells you exactly which packages you need to install in order for VMware to work, since the tarball isn’t going to do any dependency checking this is very helpful, even if its just a timesaver. Step 5, is the real life saver… without this step you may be a bit balder after you solve the problem. Basically the problem (as I understand it) is that VMware has to compile kernel modules and such. Unfortunately, it doesn’t match with the version ubuntu usess. A couple copy commands later though and presto vmware works.
Now I can start the testing I wanted to do last week 
