Running FreeBSD 5.2 RELEASE on VMware Workstation

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.