OK, a bit more digging and I could fix the problem:
- there was no glib library installed (btw, it is not listed as requirement, so I did not install it)
- it appears that the AppLoader binary shipped with vmware tools has troubles running the version of glib that is bundled with the tools themselves
so I installed libglib, and everything went smooth.
Here's the log file with the errors:
2011-11-27T23:43:59.367+01:00| appLoader| I120: Log for VMware Tools pid=2753 version=8.8.1 build=build-528969 option=Release
2011-11-27T23:43:59.367+01:00| appLoader| I120: The process is 64-bit.
2011-11-27T23:43:59.367+01:00| appLoader| I120: Host codepage=UTF-8 encoding=UTF-8
2011-11-27T23:43:59.367+01:00| appLoader| I120: Host is Linux 2.6.32-5-amd64 Debian GNU/Linux 6.0.3 (squeeze)
2011-11-27T23:43:59.394+01:00| appLoader| I120: Invocation: "/usr/lib/vmware-tools/sbin64/vmware-modconfig-console --validate-gcc gcc -- -l /usr/lib/vmware-tools"
2011-11-27T23:43:59.394+01:00| appLoader| I120: Setting libdir to /usr/lib/vmware-tools
2011-11-27T23:43:59.394+01:00| appLoader| I120: Removing 2 appLoader arguments.
2011-11-27T23:43:59.394+01:00| appLoader| I120: Dropping all arguments after --.
2011-11-27T23:43:59.394+01:00| appLoader| I120: Calling: "/usr/lib/vmware-tools/sbin64/vmware-modconfig-console --validate-gcc gcc"
2011-11-27T23:43:59.394+01:00| appLoader| I120: VMDEVEL not set.
2011-11-27T23:43:59.394+01:00| appLoader| I120: VMWARE_SHIPPED_LIBS_LIST is not set.
2011-11-27T23:43:59.394+01:00| appLoader| I120: VMWARE_SYSTEM_LIBS_LIST is not set.
2011-11-27T23:43:59.394+01:00| appLoader| I120: VMWARE_USE_SHIPPED_LIBS is not set.
2011-11-27T23:43:59.394+01:00| appLoader| I120: VMWARE_USE_SYSTEM_LIBS is not set.
2011-11-27T23:43:59.394+01:00| appLoader| I120: Using library directory: /usr/lib/vmware-tools.
2011-11-27T23:43:59.394+01:00| appLoader| I120: AppLoaderLoadGlib: Failed to open libglib-2.0.so.0. libglib-2.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
2011-11-27T23:43:59.394+01:00| appLoader| I120: Shipped glib version is 2.24
2011-11-27T23:43:59.394+01:00| appLoader| I120: System glib version is -1.-1
2011-11-27T23:43:59.394+01:00| appLoader| I120: Using shipped version of glib.
2011-11-27T23:43:59.394+01:00| appLoader| W110: Child process was terminated with signal 11.
2011-11-27T23:43:59.394+01:00| appLoader| W110: Unable to load dependencies for /usr/lib/vmware-tools/lib/libvmware-modconfig-console.so/libvmware-modconfig-console.so
2011-11-27T23:43:59.394+01:00| appLoader| W110: Unable to execute /usr/lib/vmware-tools/sbin64/vmware-modconfig-console.
Maybe an alternative fix would have been to set LD_PRELOAD_PATH=/usr/lib/vmware-tools/lib64/...
