I'm currently evaluating VMware Workstation 8, on an Ubuntu host.
I noticed, during a shotdown of the host system, an error message about '/var/lib/vmware/Shared' not found - which suggested to me that one of the vmware shutdown scripts wasn't correctly handling paths with spaces - by default, shared VMs are put in '/var/lib/vmware/Shared VMs'.
Which is a problem that should be addressed.
In the meantime, though, I decided to rename my paths to not have spaces. I shutdown my shared VMs, configured them to not be shared (which moved their files to ~/vmware), and then tried to change the path in WorkStation.
Workstation asked for the root user password.
Now here's the thing - in Ubuntu, as normally configured, the root user doesn't have a password. Root permissions are accessed via sudo, or equivalents, using the regular user's passwords, after checking that the regular user has permission to run the specific task or process as root.
So I had no root password to give to Workstation, and I was unable to rename the 'Shared VMs' folder.
It's easy enough, of course, to give the root user a password, but the need to do so should be in the installation instructions.
