[wellylug] virtualisation options?

[Daniel Pittman]

Rimu Atkinson <rimuatkinson at gmail.com> writes:

> I need to have a windows development environment around for the
> occasional piece of maintenance work from back when I developed on
> windows. My old windows box is limping along and can't keep it up much
> longer.
>
> So I'm interested in setting up a virtual machine to stick XP on. I'm
> running Ubuntu on a 2 core laptop with only 1 Gig of ram. I'll
> probably need to increase that...

Yup.  Unless you want an especially painful experience.

> In the past I used VMWare but was a bit unimpressed that I needed to
> semi-reinstall it whenever I updated my kernel. Is there anything out
> there that is
>
>  ✦ Reasonably easy to install
>  ✦ Just works out of the box, more or less
>  ✦ Free. OSS a bonus
>  ✦ Can use an external usb hard disk for the virtual drive to live on

KVM.

>  ✦ Doesn't sink it's teeth into my kernel and throw a fit whenever I
>    upgrade it

KVM ships with the kernel, so is generally free of this issue, but *any*
virtualization other than strictly software (qemu, and slow as a wet
week) is going to have to have kernel support.

KVM requires a VMX/SVM supporting CPU, and without that you would need
something like VMWare.  It would probably hurt less just to get a newer
CPU these days, though.

Regards,
        Daniel