If your host is windows, I'll walk you through the steps needed and give you some Linux commands to run from a terminal, I'll try and explain what I'm doing as the Linux command line is powerful (and some people think "fun"), most things can be done from the GUI but I consider CLI gives you a better understanding of what you are doing. Log in as root, and heed the eLive warning, this gives you access to all the machine. Generally, I would not run CLI code from a forum unless it is well moderated, you know what you are doing and the poster is "known" to the forum. (there are some silly people out there)
First off open a terminal and check which kernel you are running
uname -r
this should return something like "linux 2.6.xx-elive-686"
(where xx is the version number and you'll use it later so write it down) Open the synaptic package manager from administration menu and make sure the following are installed (the check box will be filled green if so, if not then check the box, select [mark for install] and then [apply] from the menu
make
gcc
build-essentials
linux-headers-2.6.xx-elive-686
(gcc is the compiler, build essentials are useful libraries, linux-headers are libraries of functions specific to the kernal you are running, make allows you to create/add linux kernals, and I think should be part of the distro, the others probably not.)
When this is done download vmware tools from the VMPlayer menu, this connects a virtual CD rom and you can copy the tar file to your elive filesystem. (I prefer /tmp/ but it is not important, if you want to use desktop you can, just replace /tmp/ with the path you choose) then untar the file with the command, using the name of the file you copied over.
tar zxpf /tmp/VMwareTools-5.0.0-<xxxx>.tar.gz
tar is an archive/compression utility and this should have created a vmtools distribution directory which you need to change to, the zxpf are the options to extract and overwite into the directory structure is was created from. (cd is the change directory command)
cd vmware-tools-distrib
then run the installer
./vmware-install.pl
and accept all the defaults by pressing <return>, when prompted, including running the configuration and that should do it.
I'm running elive in VMPlayer hosted on Linux for evaluation purposes and it works very well with 512MB and 4 cpu's, guess I could do it with less of each.