I apologize in advance if I haven't been thorough enough in searching the workstation 9 documentation or the community boards, but I couldn't find a post that combined everything needed for installing Workstation 9 + Shared VMs + WSX, so I thought I could start a post here and people could add to it.
I'm using Gentoo, so some of the installation commands will be different, but the concepts and the VMWare-specific files are the same.
-- [ VMWare Workstation ] --
[ Step 1 - copy the installer ]
Copy the VMWare Workstation Installer to your Linux machine
[ Step 2 - run the installer ]
As the file is an executable installer, you may need to chmod u+x VMWare-Workstation-Full-9.0.2-1031769.x86_64 first, then ./VMWare-Workstation-Full-9.0.2-1031769.x86_64.
Follow the prompts and complete the installation
[ Step 3 - prepare for licensing ]
You need to add your license key, but if you're running a headless (no X-Windows) server, you'll need to install some X libraries first:
emerge -uv libX11 libXcursor libXinerama libXtst
[ Step 4 - license ]
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-vmx --new-sn [license key]
-- [ VMWare WSX ] --
[ Step 1 - copy the installer ]
Copy the VMWare WSX Installer to your Linux machine
[ Step 2 - run the installer ]
As the file is an executable installer, you may need to chmod u+x VMWare-WSX-1.0.2-928297.x86_64 first, then ./VMWare-WSX-1.0.2-928297.x86_64.
Follow the prompts and complete the installation
-- [ Adding to system startup ] --
rc-update add vmware default
rc-update add vmware-workstation-server default
rc-update add vmware-wsx-server default
That's as far as I've gotten so far, mainly because I haven't figured out how to add permissions and roles for VMWare shared vms without the user interface. When I have some time later today, I'll follow the same procedure under Ubuntu desktop and see what files are being updated.