I found that Firefox 3.6 does not work with VMware Server 2.0.2. You cannot access the VM consoles - it seems that the required vmware plugin does not fit later firefox versions. So how to run an older version of firefox? Here is what I did: Get a legacy firefox from ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/ (I chose version 3.0.6) 'cd ~' 'wget ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.0.6/linux-i686/en-GB/firefox-3.0.6.tar.bz2' 'tar xvfj firefox-3.0.6.tar.bz2' 'cd firefox' The binary 'firefox-bin' has been linked against some of the local .so libs in the firefox tarball. Your system will need to know the locations of these libs before firefox can run: "./firefox-bin: error while loading shared libraries: libjemalloc.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory" Use ldd to probe the binary for unknown libs: $ ldd firefox-bin | grep found libjemalloc.so => not found libxul.so => not found libmozjs.so => not found libxpcom.so => not found So I copied them over to /usr/local/lib, added the location to ld.so.conf and re-ran ldconfig: ( I kept the version string in case I want to run other versions later.. ) 'mkdir /usr/local/lib/firefox-3.0.6' 'cp libjemalloc.so /usr/local/lib/firefox-3.0.6' 'cp libxul.so /usr/local/lib/firefox-3.0.6' 'cp libmozjs.so /usr/local/lib/firefox-3.0.6' 'cp libxpcom.so /usr/local/lib/firefox-3.0.6' 'echo "/usr/local/lib/firefox-3.0.6" > /etc/ld.so.conf.d/firefox-3.0.6.conf' # I'm on Linux Mint, your ld.so.conf setup may vary. 'ldconfig' Now firefox should work: '~/firefox/firefox' I also found that the vm console would crash unless I added 'mainMem.useNamedFile = "FALSE"' to the VMs .vmx config file. This might be due to running the VMs from an NFS volume but ymmv.