A lot of times I end up downloading VM appliances for different systems – whether for testing or for actual use – that are preconfigured with some sort of Linux flavor. I use the Sun VirtualBox app to run the VMs. A couple of times I have run into the following error when booting up the OS:
Kernel panic – not syncing : Attempted to kill init!
It seems the fix is to go into the Settings of the VM, go to the System section and in the Motherboard tab check the “Enable IO APIC“.
This is using VirtualBox version 3.1.4r57640
Are you on the bus? 