I thought a simple

sudo apt-get install vmware-player

would do the trick. Well, it looked good for a while – it downloaded the package and its dependencies and went through the license agreement and the configuration and even successfully started the VMware services. But then it died with:

VMware Player is installed, but it has not been (correctly) configured
for the running kernel. To (re-)configure it, invoke the
following command: /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl.

invoke-rc.d: initscript vmware-player, action "start" failed.
dpkg: error processing vmware-player (--configure):
 subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
 vmware-player
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

I tried to reinstall it and I tried dpkg-reconfigure, but to no avail.

Incidentally, there is no file on my system called /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl; all I have is /usr/bin/vmware-config-network.pl and running that doesn’t help either.

Eventually, I found the answer here.

sudo rm /etc/vmware/not_configured

Hacky, but effective.