As for the VMWare installation the easiest is to just download any of the existing VMWare hard disk images, add it to a Linux 2.6 kernel based VMWare Virtual Machine setup and then boot it. You can then use web based interface to upgrade to a later version. BrainSlayer don't have time to make updated VMWare hard disk images all the time, and frankly this is not his first priority. DD-WRT is for running natively on a x86 box and not in some virtualized environment.
I don't think you need much of a how-to. This stuff is not for people who are unfamiliar with tinkering and computers in the first place. DD-WRT x86 is a specialized solutions and it's not very cheap either. Just the miniPCI to PCI adapter alone tells you this is something you should be prepared to invest a lot of money in if you are interested.
As for installing on a hard drive, this has been explained in the readme.txt file in the download section and need to sacrifice an entire physical drive. _________________ I own a Linksys WRT54G v3.1 and I am using DD-WRT