Apparently the kernel module to read hfs-formated disks is less functional than the one for hfsplus-formated disks. I managed to crash my system mounting an hfs-formatted CD. A good alternative are the hfs utilities (hfsutils). There is also an easy GUI for them called xhfsutil.
Although a standard Windows XP Professional OS cannot read (= mount) Macintosh-formatted CDs (neither hfs nor hfs+), the burning program Nero Express can duplicate such CDs!
The error message during VMware setup (vmware-config.pl) is due to the fact that Suse 9 has a too new package for the requested library:
/usr/bin/vmware-smbpasswd.bin: error while loading shared libraries: libpopt.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
The following fixes the problem:
ln -s /usr/lib/libpopt.so.1 /usr/lib/libpopt.so.0