Comment # 21 on bug 976293 from Giuseppe Gorgoglione

I tried the official x86-64 binaries from blender.org.
Well, the Blender application found there, launched plain vanilla, crashes
exactly in the same way. But in the official package I also found a
blender-softwaregl script which starts Blender preloading custom libGL.so and
libGLU.so libraries, which probably are just the Mesa software renderer.
Launching this script Blender works fine.
I guess there is some bug into the VMware software stack which provides OpenGL
3.1 acceleration to the Linux guest systems.