For those who are unaware, VMWare offers the free VMWare player. It’s an ok way to bridge the gap between not having any virtualization and a full-blown VMWare Workstation. There are only a limited number of pre-built Virtual Machines for VMWare player from the VMWare site, however.
There are instructions online on how to install a new OS in VMWare Player, but of course that means that you can’t install VMWare Tools.
The better solution (for the short term) is to allow those who have a full VMWare Workstation installed to create virtual machines for use in the player. Riding to the rescue on this front is vmwarez.com – a site that offers prebuilt virtual machines of Open Source OSes for use in VMWare Player. And I see that there are finally some community built machines showing up on the VMWare site now, as well.
I would, however, still recommend getting VMWare Workstation as soon as you can. It is more than worth it!