So in general, we don't recommend running Chimera within vmware (or any other virtual machine, like virtualbox) because Chimera needs direct access to the graphics hardware for the best performance.

That said, to get it to work, you'll need to read the vmware documentation to figure out how to enable "accelerated 3D graphics".  It will probably requiring installing an appropriate graphics driver in your Linux virtual machine, and  might require a newer version Linux in your virtual machine, or possibly a newer version of vmware.  Some links I found:  VMware Horizon View 5.2 and Hardware Accelerated 3D Graphics,
VMware Fusion Help > Configuring Your Virtual Machines, X.org Drivers for VMware virtual graphics,
How to fix 3D Acceleration for Vmware Workstation 9?, VMware promises better 3D graphics on virtualized desktops.  It appears that 3D graphics in vmware is still a "work in progress".

Perhaps someone who has configured vmware for 3D will speak up.

    Good luck,

    Greg

On 10/23/2013 10:21 AM, Stephen P. Molnar wrote:
I have installed chimera-1.8-linux-x86_64 in VMware Player v-6.0.0 build-1295980 without any waning or error messages.

When I start chimera I get the splash screen, then:

./chimera
X Error of failed request:  BadDrawable (invalid Pixmap or Window parameter)
  Major opcode of failed request:  72 (X_PutImage)
  Resource id in failed request:  0x4000064
  Serial number of failed request:  1352
  Current serial number in output stream:  1358
computation@inga:~/Apps/chimera/bin$

Please advise.

Thanks in advance.