WinXP on anotther partition running as guest OS: is it possible (for free)?

[Konstantin Svist]

John Summerfield wrote:
> Phil Meyer wrote:
>> Andre Costa wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I have here Fedora 8 and WinXP on the same machine. I use XP mostly
>>> for gaming, but every once in a while I have to edit some Word docs
>>> sent by clients on MS Word. ... As much as I wish, OpenOffice isn't
>>> just there yet, sometimes it messes with the docs, I already tried
>>> this and received complaints about format changes. It sucks, and
>>> eventually there will be 100% compatibility, but there's still some
>>> ground to cover.
>>>
>>> According to VMWare Workstation FAQ I could run my installed XP as a
>>> guest system, but I was wondering if there was no free alternative,
>>> since it costs USD 189,00 and I will only need it every once in a
>>> while.
>>>
>>> Anyone solved a similar problem? Any advice on what to use and what to
>>> avoid? Any pitfalls?
>>>
>>> Thks,
>>>
>>> Andre
>>>
>>>   
>>
>> qemu and qemu-kvm are alternatives.  They perform better (IMO) then 
>> the commercial offerings, especially if you have a kvm compatible CPU.
>
> kvm and xen are a bit rough around the edges. I'm running f9alpha at 
> present (trying to get past my problems with xen and kvm). I don't 
> have a running kernel-xen, and my kvm virtual machines (debian, Centos 
> 5.1 install) both stall after a while, the latter well before it's 
> installed).
>
> otoh virtual PC under Windows works quite well.
>
>
>

I've found that Xen is indeed rough around the edges (because you need 
to use a special kernel), but KVM works great. The only problem I've had 
with it was that when running it by hand, I couldn't get [either network 
or sound..can't remember which] to work (didn't really try all that 
hard), and when running via Virtual Machine Manager, I wasn't able to 
change the configuration (add/remove CPUs, RAM, etc.). Other than this, 
everything works pretty much just like VMWare -- and doesn't require 
kernel module recompilations.
IMHO, Xen is suited for hardcore virtualizers - but if you just need one 
VM (which is probably true for most end-users), KVM is the better way to go.