I had several problems testing freesurfer 5.2 installation, as previously posted. Now it is all OK and I would like to share what I could learn:
1- It does not work on Fedora 18 (segfaults with all tests with tkmedit, tksurfer and recon-all) that is due to a restriction imposed by glibc (only newest version). Only freeview works under Fedora 18 but, even here, I got a misalignment problem among surfaces and volumes. More details at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=905638 2- I got partial functionality using VirtualBox (4.2.8 and 4.2.10). I cannot say about previous versions and the latest one (4.2.12 was released on Apriil, 12th). But I had problems with both virtual machines I tried: CentOS6 (fresh install) and the Xubuntu + FreeSurfer 5.1 vdi file I downloaded from FreeSurfer website. Tkmedit, tksurfer and freeview all worked but recon-all failed all time. 3- Fedora 17 and CentOS 6 work flawlessly out of box if you do not use virtualbox. Probably, other distros will work too, except if they are using the latest glibc (2.16-30). So my final setup is a dual boot machine: Fedora 18 (day-by-day tasks) and CentOS6 (freesurfer tasks). You can do it with only one disk but it is a lot easier with two.
I hope it can help people with similar problems.