VMWare 2.0.2 on CentOS 5.4

In order to get a working environment I described here, I need to install VMware 2.0.2 on my OS, CentOS 5.4.
VMware 2.x is very different than VMWare 1.x, it is a web based application, and a lot of bugs have been fixed.
Unfortunately, it was not workable, after few minutes up and running, the webserver was hanging and crashing. Unless you reboot the server, no way to make anything inside VMWare.

After a lot of research, it appears that VMWare 2.0.2 does not like the glibc and glibc-common libraries coming within CentOS 5.4.
So, we need to downgrade them to their version of CentOS 5.3. Here are the steps :

1. Go to /etc/yum.repos.d and copy the file CentOS-Base.repo to CentOS53-Base.repo
2. In CentOS53-Base.repo, rename all the packages within 53 :
[base] will become [base53]
[updates] => [updates53]
[addons] => [addons53]
[extras] => [extras53]
[centosplus] => [centosplus53]
[contrib] => [contrib53]
3. In CentOS53-Base.repo, replace all the occurences of release=$releasever by release=5.3
4. Downgrade the glibc and glibc-common libraries by running the following :
yum downgrade glibc glibc-common
3 packages are installed, 15 are removed.
5. To avoid further upgrade/update of those libraries (awaiting a fix of VMWare), we need to exclude them from the update's list. Add the following line in /etc/yum.conf :
exclude=glibc glibc-common glibc-devel glibc-headers nscd
6. Finally, reboot the server, and re-run vmware-config.pl, and everything should work fine !

UPDATE (16-MAY-2010) : problem solved within CentOS 5.5

Enjoy,