Sam Johnson has a quick post on installing the VMWare tools on Ubuntu 8.04 (sometimes not a totally straightforward process).

Here are some slightly modified version of the instructions:

• Virtual Machine->Install VMware Tools (that’s the easy part)
• apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r)
• mount /cdrom
• cd /cdrom
• cp VMwareTools*.tar.gz /tmp
• cd /tmp
• tar xzf VMwareTools*
• cd vmware-tools-distrib
• ./vmware-install.pl
• Press enter for everything until it won’t go any further because it wants the real location of your kernel headers. For me, with the desktop install, it correctly listed it.  If it doesn’t have the right location supply it ‘/lib/modules/2.6.24-19-generic/build/include’ (replacing ‘2.6.24-19-generic’ with the correct directory for your install) and then keep pressing enter again until you get back to your prompt.