What is the network adapter configuration necessary for a client-style VMWare Player on a laptop?

[#1]

While I've been able to get a 2.4 vmware player sandbox to work on my desktop under a NAT adapter without issue, I cannot get a second vmware player to work in a wireless environment on a laptop. The choices I've made so far for the network settings on the guest vm have been NAT or NAT Networking. Both of these choices return the same results-- an error on startup which reads: device eth0 does not seem to be present, then: Connectivity Issues Detected! when the startup process has completed. No IP address is displayed.

Well, the vm isn't wrong since I don't have any ports/addresses set up--but I haven't a clue how to bridge the dynamic wireless environment to ip addresses/ports. I am not a network geek, so this has turned out to be a frustrating stumbling block. Please advise.

[#2 · Accepted solution]

To those techie pioneers that may be following behind me:

I decided to follow the trail of the missing address assignments inherent in the "device eth0 does not seem to be present" from the guest opsys. I looked on my laptop's network devices to confirm that the network adapter that I needed (VMNet8) was missing in action. Here are the steps I followed.