How to install VMWARE Workstation in Puppy?

[acampa01]

Please help me with this tiny issue:
I have puppy 1.0.7 installed on a USB drive. I am trying to get VMware WOrkstation loaded on this install. I have installed perl and am having trouble with the install and configuration of VMware. Once you unzip the tar from vmware, you run an install.pl. This pl causes an error in the /etc dir. It appears that vmware tries to create both a dir and a file with the name vmware in this location. Reguardless of which you leave (file or dir) when you run the configuration pl you get an error that the dir does not exist, or that the file can not be found (based on what one i removed)

Has anyone gotten vmworkstation to load succesfuly on puppy? If not are there other small footprint linux flavors out there that will?

I am very very new to linux, and have strugled with this. My ultimate goal is to take my 60gig usb drive, put a puppy boot on it, vmware, and an xp virtual machine. This will allow me to take my "pc" anywhere there is a pc with sufficient resources to run my virutal machine. I already run the vpc under 2k or xp with the windows based vmware, but would love to go to the next step with linux.
Any and all help is appreciated.....
Note: you can easily recreate my issues by downloading the free 30 day install from www.vmware.com
Thanks
Aaron