Setting up a VM to run XP in an up-to-date F12 box?

[Greg Woods]

On Sat, 2009-11-28 at 06:49 -0800, Mike Cloaked wrote:

> 
> Interesting replies - thank you - but noticeable that the fedora provided
> facility of kvm has been mentioned by no-one!

In my opinion, kvm is not quite ready for prime time. First of all, it
doesn't work at all unless your system has hardware virtualization
support, in both the BIOS and the CPU. When it does work, it's a little
rough around the edges. I frequently get Python stack dumps when I try
to do things like shut down a VM. 

That said, I do use it on a couple of Dell systems with Core Duo
processors, one desktop at work and one laptop and it works well enough
for my needs. But I would never try to use it in a production
environment. At work, we use Xen under CentOS 5 and RHEL 5, and at home
on a Pentium 4 system without the necessary hardware virtualization, I
am a happy VirtualBox user.

One thing I have never been able to do under any VM system is to sync my
Palm Pilot via an XP VM. It sees the USB device but it never gets a
connection. This works fine with a native XP boot. Syncing the Palm to
Evolution works OK but it lacks the conduits to sync to the proprietary
calendaring system at work so I'm stuck with Windoze for that.

--Greg