The game will never run under VMWare, because in the virtual OS it uses an emulated graphics adapter which cannot run heavy 3d games.

If you want run ARR under Linux you should try Wine, it apparently worked very well on 1.00, so hopefully it will run well in ARR. Whist Wine is essentially an emulated environment unlike VMWare it recognizes and uses the hardware graphics adapter which allows it to run heavy 3d applications.

Source: I use VMWare all the time and I know it extremely well, and a Linux geek, hell just a geek all over