Over the last week, I have had VMware misreport the speed of my CPU and have virtual machines like they’re on speed. To cure it, I tried restarting the PC a few times but that yield no joy, even if it did work the last time that VMware did this on me. Following some instructions from the Ubuntu forums set things back onto an even keel again. The commands required follow:

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r) build-essential gcc-3.4

tar xzf VMware-workstation-6.0.2-59824.x86_64.tar.gz

export CC=/usr/bin/gcc-3.4 && cd vmware-distrib && sudo ./vmware-install.pl

The first of these adds in a specific version of the GNU C compiler while also adding kernel headers; the latter weren’t needed on my system since I already had them. The second extracts files from the tarball while the last performs the required installation rites.