VMWare has a habitual problem with NOT being usable in Ubuntu until several months after a release. I found a fix here: http://askubuntu.com/questions/130937/how-do-i-install-vmware-player-4-0-3. The bottom line is here:
I based this on the instructions I found here: vmware player compile issue. To boil it down to the simplest steps:
Download this tarball: http://weltall.heliohost.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/vmware802fixlinux320.tar.gz
Extract the tarball in your home directory
Edit the file patch-modules_3.2.0.sh. Look for the line plreqver=4.0.2 and change it to plreqver=4.0.3
Save the file, then run it. sudo ./patch-modules_3.2.0.sh
We plan to evaluate an alternative, VirtualBox, but until then these fixes work for the current situation with VMWare Player 4.0.4 and Ubuntu 12.04.
Hope this Helps!
–Kubulai