[ Thanks to SilentBob4 for this link.
]
“VMware expects a traditional SysV init as found on popular
Linux distributions such as Red Hat, Fedora, and Mandriva Linux,
when it installs its services. It expects to write to a structure
such as /etc/init.d/rcx.d (where X represents the various
runlevels). Slackware is not setup like this at all since it uses
the BSD init system, placing all of it’s scripts in a flat format
located in the /etc/rc.d/ directory. It’s actually a very simple
way to organize things, as SysV in my opinion is overly
complicated. In any event, you can get around this issue by
creating a ‘dummy’ init directory for VMware to install to. If it
isn’t present, VMware will fail miserably…”