<html><head><style type='text/css'>p { margin: 0; }</style></head><body><div style='font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; color: #000000'><rimuatkinson@gmail.com><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"><br>>
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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.<br>>
<br><br>That's the reason so many people go with virtualisation now...<br><br>>
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...<br><br>yup<br><br>>
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In the past I used VMWare but was a bit unimpressed that I needed to
semi-reinstall it whenever I updated my kernel. <br><br>sudo vmware-config.pl - takes about 5 minutes all up. Well worth it in my opinion, but then I try to avoid kernel updates unless they're major.<br><br>The other offerings out there will also make changes when the kernel is updated - Xen and kvm are both closely hooked into the kernel and Virtual Box uses a module. You just won't know what's going to break each time you use it.<br></font><br>My fave is still VMWare Server - it's free, fast enough, just works, and all the devices I need work properly, plus I can re-use VM's I made ages ago without pain. The others all have limitations - ymmv.<br><br>Given you want to run Windows and for development performance is an issue, you will need to use something that doesn't rely on paravirtualisation for any i/o performance - that cuts out Xen as although you are able to do hardware virtualisation it's not that quick. KVM is also not the greatest, and I had endless issues with changing the CD (should be easy?) meaning I gave up as I had some real work to do. I haven't tried Virtual Box in earnest yet but it seems like it's worth a better look.<br></rimuatkinson@gmail.com></div></body></html>