To: andrewes

What are you talking about???

The OP is running Debian (2.6.18-3-486)which has nothing to do with RHEL5 which is not released yet and the beta2 test release uses kernel-2.6.18-1.2747.el5

And yes RHEL5 runs VMWare-Workstation 5.5.2 or 5.5.3 just file, the vmware-any-any-update need to be appiled for this. The kernel-devel rpms or the kernel source need to be installed and prepped for configuration to work.

$ vmware -v
VMware Workstation 5.5.3 build-34685

$ service vmware status
Bridged networking on /dev/vmnet0 is running
Host-only networking on /dev/vmnet1 is running
Host-only networking on /dev/vmnet8 is running
NAT networking on /dev/vmnet8 is running
Module vmmon loaded
Module vmnet loaded

Hahaha, nothing worse than troubles installing something, maybe you should just use a common distro, and mount the .iso of the OS to the CD drive of your Virtual Machine?
Thats how I do it