I had a heck of a time getting VMWare Server running on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron). The problem is that the vmmon and vmnet modules fail to build against kernel 2.6.24. A little googling quickly reveals that you want the any-any-update patch, but that didn't work for me either. To be specific, vmware-any-any-update117c.tar.gz did not work. It turns out vmware-any-any-update-116.tgz works great. Maybe 117 is for the 2.6.25 kernel or something.
So, you do the vmware installation except for the vmware-config.pl step. Then you download and extract the above tarball and run runme.pl. Simple enough.
But when you try to run it, you get errors like this:
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_3.4' not found (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_4.2.0' not found (required by /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_3.4' not found (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_4.2.0' not found (required by /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_3.4' not found (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_4.2.0' not found (required by /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6)
I'm not sure what the right way to fix this is, but this way works for me.
sudo cp /lib/libgcc_s.so.1 /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/
