Switching to terminal desktop using ctrl+alt+F# (#=1...6) does not require a specific time, if the desktop has booted completely then it should work.
However there is indeed a tidbit more. Workstation itself uses by default the Ctrl+Alt keys to give the focus back to the host.
So if your keypress is unlucky you might ended up with Ctrl+Alt+F2 at the host OS instead of sending it to the guest OS.
Just had a look at what linux Mint version you are trying to run and it appears to be the latest one. At the wikipedia page it mentions it should be using kernel 3.16.
Anyways.. with VMware Workstation 7 I'm afraid you'll end up with more issues as the VMware Tools from Workstation 7 is likely not going to work in a current version of Linux.
One thing you could try instead is to use a Linux version that is closer to your workstation version. Ubuntu 12.04 comes to mind, it has maintenance support until 2017
http://www.ubuntu.com/info/release-end-of-life
As Mint is ubuntu based any steps that are outlined in articles for Mint will be similar (or even the same) on ubuntu.
http://releases.ubuntu.com/12.04/
Perhaps even the 14.04 version would still work
PS: FreePascal for ARM programming sounds great! (I occasionally use Delphi XE with firemonkey myself)
--
Wil
