I assume that you work in the following way:
- you start your virtual machine in “vmware”
- it “boots” and you get a graphical Ubuntu “gdm” / “kdm” / “xdm” window
- you “login” as “someuser”, and your “gnome” / “kde” / “afterimage” session starts
- you open an “xterm” / “gnome terminal” / “kde terminal” window which runs a “bash” shell
- inside of this terminal, you run “. /…/bin/thisroot.sh” and then “root”
Can you check the output of (pay attention to all “absolute paths” reported):
which root
type root
which root.exe
type root.exe
ldd root-config --bindir
/root
ldd root-config --bindir
/root.exe
ldd root-config --libdir
/libCore.so
ldd root-config --libdir
/libRint.so
ldd root-config --libdir
/libCint.so