Comment 12 for bug 47538

After much cursing, I'm slowly making progress while trying to install this sucker. Removing everything in the /etc/vmware dir seemed to just mess things up for Adept. Plus, it didn't work here, so I don't recommend it.

Here's my recipe so far:

1) Using the Adept Manager, install the vmware-player-kernel-modules package to match your kernel's release and build (in my case, these were version 2.6.17-12).¹ If you get stuck with Adept Manager to the point where it doesn't let you install stuff, enter "dpkg --configure -a" in your terminal.² ³

2) Possibly unneeded, issue a "dpkg --configure -a"² ³.

3) Load some needed kernel modules by issuing these commands²:
modprobe vmmon
modprobe vmnet
modprobe bridge

4) Install or reinstall the vmware-player package issuing: "apt-get install vmware-player"². Answer "yes" (or just press Return) to all questions.

These are the results on my machine:

Starting VMware services:
   Virtual machine monitor done
   Virtual ethernet done
   Bridged networking on /dev/vmnet0 failed
   Host-only networking on /dev/vmnet1 (background) done
   Host-only networking on /dev/vmnet8 (background) done
   NAT service on /dev/vmnet8 failed
invoke-rc.d: initscript vmware-player, action "start" failed.
dpkg: error processing vmware-player (--configure):
 subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
 vmware-player

As you see, there are still errors (namely on bridged networking and NAT) but I still don't know if they affect services that I need. The program starts OK, I haven't tried to load any VM so far. Will keep you posted if I encounter more problems.

Notes:

¹ To find out your kernel's release/build numbers, issue "uname -a" in your terminal.
² All terminal commands given here must be issued as root.
³ Ignore the errors returned here, if any.