If I made a VM and installed Windows XP, or any other OS, would I then be able to open the VM in the player and install software? do I need the full version of VMware to alter virtual machines?
Lol, I don't think we could have hijacked a thread any better if we tried!
To answer your question, yes, you should be able to install software on the Guest OS running in the VMware player. (Just keep this in mind when settting the max disk size for the virtual disk, and I reccomend allocating the space for it instead of dynamically sizing it)
I just finished testing the flatfile webmap on a Slackware 10.0 - Apache 1.3.31 - php 4.3.7 - eAccelerator 0.9.2 install... it worked quite nicely.
Note when constructing a VM it is important to install the VMware tools as instructed for the particular guest OS, it made quite a difference in the performance of my Slackware VM. It also allows for shared folders between the guest and host OS.
For networking I find using the VMWare NAT and DHCP the most straightforward, you can setup port forwarding under NAT in the virtual networking options. (I tested viewing the webmap running on my Slackware VM from my WinXP host OS using this feature)
EDIT: Don't forget the new free server version has many features of the workstation and is not a demo that expires.