Comment 87 for bug 117314

I checked for the status as you asked.
Turns out for some reason linux-generic was not installed. To fix it, I did an apt-get update, installed it via your command line above and then did an apt-get upgrade just to be sure I had everything as current as possible.

While X11 starts ok now - the VMware server at first still could not be used. The VMware-Server-Console started, however I could not resume an existing VM.

There is a strange thing I noticed:
$ dpkg -s vmware-server-kernel-modules
Package: vmware-server-kernel-modules
Status: install ok installed
Priority: optional
Section: devel
Installed-Size: 52
Maintainer: Ubuntu Kernel Team <email address hidden>
Architecture: i386
Source: linux-meta
Version: 2.6.20.15.14
Depends: vmware-server-kernel-modules-2.6.20-15
Description: vmware-server kernel module dependency package
 This empty package allows people to keep their VMware Server kernel
 modules up-to-date when upgrading their Linux kernel.

This shows a dependency on version 2.6.20-15 of vmware-server-kernel-modules, even though this is not the most recent one. Shouldn't this be -16 after my update/upgrade cycle?

Via lsmod I found out that neither vmmon nor vmnet had been loaded. Trying to modprobe them did not work, because they simply were not installed for the -16 kernel.

So I manually installed vmware-server-kernel-modules-2.6.20-16 (which is listed along with the -15 version):

$ dpkg -p vmware-server-kernel-modules-2.6.20-16
Package: vmware-server-kernel-modules-2.6.20-16
Priority: optional
Section: restricted/misc
Installed-Size: 7096
Maintainer: Ubuntu Kernel Team <email address hidden>
Architecture: i386
Source: linux-restricted-modules-2.6.20
Version: 2.6.20.5-16.28
Depends: module-init-tools, linux-image-2.6
Conflicts: vmware-player-kernel-modules-2.6.20-16
Size: 2774320
Description: vmware-server modules for Linux (kernel 2.6.20)
 This package contains the set of loadable kernel modules for
 VMware Server.
 .
 This package contains the compiled kernel modules for 2.6.20. All
 supported kernel types for this architecture are included in this single
 package.

Now I can resume the virtual machine again. Seems like a problem with the empty pseudo package to me?