There are a few known problems related to installing the latest vmware (1.0.5) under Ubuntu 8.04. This is because vmware currently only supports up to Ubuntu 7.10.

First of all, you will need to install everything needed in order to be ready to compile c/c++ code on your system. Ubuntu supplies a virtual package for that, called 'build-essential'.

$ sudo aptitude install build-essential

Then we can download the needed vmware-files from http://register.vmware.com/content/download-a.html. You will need to download the VMWare-Server package for Linux. Then simply extract the tarball and execute the installer.

$ tar zxvf VMware-server-1.0.5-80187.tar.gz
$ cd vmware-server-distrib/
$ sudo ./vmware-install.pl

Next you'll to download the vmware-any-any update from http://vmkernelnewbies.googlegroups.com/web/vmware-any-any-update-116.tgz, extract it, and run the installer.

$ tar zxvf vmware-any-any-update-116.tgz
$ cd vmware-any-any-update116/
$ sudo ./runme.pl

Now if you run vmware, or vmware-server-console, you will get some errors because a few libraries are not found in the system. We can simply resolve this problem by copying the needed libraries to the correct paths, with the correct filenames.

$ sudo cp /usr/lib/libpng12.so.0 /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libpng12.so.0/
$ sudo cp /usr/lib/gcc/i486-linux-gnu/4.2.3/libgcc_s.so /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1
$ sudo cp /usr/lib/gcc/i486-linux-gnu/4.2.3/libgcc_s.so /usr/lib/vmware-server-console/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1

Now run vmware-server-console and have running your virtual machines.