Ok - here's what I found. After migrating a perfectly running instance of OpenSUSE 10.3 from Windows and player.exe to Mac with Fusion I ended up with a total failure. Disastrous failure in fact. I've deleted it from my Mac system and I'm done with it (OpenSUsE and Fedora). I'm wasting my time with this stuff. The guides offer what are supported versions of Linux and I suspect it's best to stay within that list even though it's not what I require.

But just as an observation - Fusion has been referred to as polar opposites of ESX, yet the supported Leenooxes for both environments are what advanced users would be expected to use (and I like to think after 25 years in this I'm something of an advanced user). This looks like an expanding support of low-hanging fruit - what worked in ESX will be fine in Fusion. The problem children for Linux on Fusion are Ubuntu and the freebie Leenooxes from Novell and RedHat. I'm guessing the typical OS X user isn't going to deploy EL anything but I could be wrong. Anyway - nuff time wasted chasing this. I'll accept what I have as good enough and leave it at that.

I'd love to be told I'm wrong and that all I have to do to get OpenSUsE and Fedora Core 8 working with dynamic screen size and cut/paste is to just ... (here a miracle occurs).

Cranky as I sound, Fusion is still a spectacular system and has gotten me very far down a path otherwise not available, so overall I'm a happy/cranky customer who has run out of time to make this stuff behave as I'd like.

More experimenting - and I have to tell you, snapshots are your friend. What a great tool that is. It would sure be nice to have multiple snapshots, hint hint.

I re-installed the OpenSuSE 10.3-Gnome appliance (the one copied from and that works perfectly in Windows with Player). I decided to ignore the prompt to update the vmware tools and explored some. I'd always updated the tools first when installing this appliance. So here's what works in Fusion if I don't change the tools:

Fusion 1.1.1, MacBook Pro, OS X 10.5.1
Linux opensuse-vm 2.6.22.9-0.4-default #1 SMP 2007/10/05 21:32:04 UTC i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

Dynamic screen size works perfectly
Cut/Copy and Paste either direction works
Drag and Drop files works from OpenSuSE to OS X but not the other way
Networking (dhcp) failed to configure eth1, but it shows up in ifconfig -a so the device is there.

I manually configured the network, added a default route, and updated /etc/resolv.conf to point to the host IP (same as default route) and got networking to function.

So I'm back leveled on the tools but things are working well enough that I'm able to get some work done. I'll crawl the logs and explore the networking issue to see why dhcp failed when time permits, but for now I've scripted the net configuration and things are looking up. I gots happy feets.

I found that attempting to run vmware-config-tools.pl without updating the tools will error out with a path problem looking for kernel includes. I'll go back to the Windows platform I copied this vm from and see what happens there. This should be entirely host agnostic as it all happens inside the vm.

Edit: Time moved on and I had time to check into this

Running the Yast network configurator restored the DHCP functionality so networking is now working. I didn't remember to mention it earlier, but sound is also working. I recommend listening to http://irh.com/ while working on this stuff it's very calming.

To summarize:
* I have a nearly 100% functional instance of OpenSuSE 10.3 running. Only missing part is Drag 'n Drop from the host to the guest. Going the other way works fine.
* I have an outdated version of VMware Tools and I'm going to leave it that way for now
* I still gots happy feets

To Do: Install the same OpenSuSE version from the appliance file linked here in the appliances section and see if I can repeat this. That is the appliance I installed in Windows player and later copied to OS X. I'm just curious - nothing to gain but knowledge.