FreeBSD 5.2 RELEASE is just been released and if you like installing it on your VMware Workstation virtual machine (I tried on 4.0.5 version) you'll need a little hack to make it works. After defining a new VM with defualt FreeBSD settings don't start it, but power it off. Now open new .vmx file just created and add on bottom this line: monitor_control.disable_apic="TRUE" Now you can install and run it without further problems. Thanks to Joe Landers for this trick posted on vmware.guest.misc newsgroup.