Let’s not pretend I have some remarkably written tutorial here. I just smile and point…

In order to get VMWare Server set up on Ubuntu 8.04, do this and then do this. Simplify.

UPDATE: On a completely different, newly updated machine that had had a preexisting version of VMWare installed, applying the vmware-any-any-update-116.tgz patch worked, while the previous two solutions did not.