Hi appideas,
What you're trying to do sounds fairly straightforward... it should simply work, as long as you've chosen NAT and set the Ethernet device to ON in the VM settings – for NAT, I think it'll only show "no link present"/"cable disconnected" if you've configured the virtual network device but not actually turned it ON.
If you've double-checked that, maybe vmware.log will tell us what's going wrong. Dig into the virtual machine's bundle (instructions here), find the file named vmware.log, and attach it to your reply (just use the Browse... button below when composing your reply).
Cheers,
--
Darius