I'm running Ubuntu 64 bit on my T-61 laptop as the host OS (so that I could actually use the full 4GB of ram issued to me when I received my laptop). I run workstation 6.5 and host all of my VM's I use to accomplish my job functions. One of the initial challenges that I ran into while running Workstation on Ubuntu started when I was creating a laptop lab to host ESX 3.5 and ESXi servers inside Workstation on my laptop. During boot time, ESX and ESXi attempt to put your network connections into promiscuous mode, which under Ubuntu isn't possible without the proper read / write permissions on the /dev/vmnet* items.

As such, I created a simple script that, once included in /etc/init.d will allow this action to occur during system startup. I'm attaching both the simple script and the instructions on how to execute and add this component to your startup sequence for Ubuntu. I've also attached a tar.gz file which includes both the script and the instructions.

Enjoy.

How to set VMnets at startup:

1) Extract the vmnetset.tar.gz file to your desktop or any other location.

2) Copy the vmnetset.sh script to your /etc/init.d directory by executing the following:
a) cp /directory/where/the/script/is/vmnetset.sh /etc/init.d/

3) Execute the following commands to set the script to boot and to assign the proper symlinks for bootup
a) sudo update-rc.d vmnetset.sh defaults
b) sudo chmod +x vmnetset.sh

4) Once completed, reboot system and validate your network settings by:
a) open a terminal window and type ls -l /dev |grep vmnet

If all vmnet settings are set rw, you are good to go!

To remove the script from startup: sudo update-rc.d -f vmnetset.sh remove