VMWare Workstation on Debian AMD64

I've just upgraded to the x86_64 Debian architecture (AMD64). When installing vmware workstation for x86_64 it complained about some missing libraries but the installation finished nevertheless.

However the application would not open any VMs, spitting this error:

/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-vmx: error while loading shared libraries: libX11.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Turns out some of the VMWare binaries need 32bit libraries, even on the 64bit version. This post on vmware's knowledge base gave a solution for Red Hat distros. On Debian the solution is analogous: you just need to install the package ia32-libs.

You will need to re-install VMWare so that it regenerates the vmmon kernel module. The vmware-any-any patch is not needed.