I have searched and read how to do it, but its like reading chinese for me. I am at a total loss. I installed Mandriva 10.1 on VMWare.
My hardware is as follows:
Motherboard - ABIT NF7-S2
Processor - AMD Athlon XP 2800+
Hard Disk Drive - Western Digital 160GB 7,200
Western Digital 40GB 7,200
Video Card - ATI Radeon 9800Pro 128MB
RAM - Geil 1 512MB & 2X 256MB 3200 DDR400 Value
I have understood that the error I get is because of a bad driver. I want to download a driver from the ATI site, but I have to choose the right XFree86 version. It says that for me to find out what version I have, I have to run check.sh. So I downloaded check.sh. How the heck do I run this thing? I am running this on vmware don't forget. So I am not sure where to place the check.sh file.
First things first. I am sure I will need additional help. Thanks!

Hum... I thought that you couldn't use the venders driver and had to use the VM-tools instead...

You don't need to install the ATI driver, as VMware is emulating hardware, not passing it through to your virtual machine. When you set it up, select the generic VESA module, just to get it up and running. Once it's up and running, you should be able to install the VMware Tools from the "Tools" menu.

Then I would suggest you discuss this here:

http://www.vmware.com/community/index.jspa

As you seem to be confused as to how VMware works, and I think they would be able to explain things more efficiently and correctly than I could.

Thanks for your answers. You helped me get started! I didn't know/remember what command let me change the video driver, but I found XF86config and changed to VESA driver. That worked. So thank you!

You don't fix the video problem that you're having in the Linux install. Go to VMTools in one of the menus. It will push what it wants the Linux install to have and then your video will be fixed. You don't need to mess with XF86config at all.