Now bochs is up to 2.2 (almost). Would this make a good replacement for vmware for the home user who uses it maybe once every few weeks, only to run corel photopaint 9? I would like to install windows xp on it.
I'd try with qemu and kqemu accelerator module:
http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/
It can emulate Intel PC, Sparc, PowerPC and possibly others. PC emulation is stable, Sparc and PowerPC are still somewhat experimental.
By default, it will emulate Intel CPU using software. There is also accelerator module kqemu (it is a kernel module) that enables Intel instructions to be run natively on Intel (no emulation). However, to use it, you need to fetch version of qemu from CVS, and recompile (instructions included with accelerator module). You'd also want CVS version if you want to run Windows XP (some bug fixed that prevented Win XP from booting).
I'm using CVS version of qemu with accelerator module from time to time, and it works very nice. I used it to run Red Hat 7.3, Fedora Core 3, CentOS 4, Windows XP, and Solaris 10 (for x86). The only grief I had was that qemu emulates only PCI version of ne2000 Ethernet card, and that particular card (although very common) is not supported under Solaris x86.
The qemu emulates an entire virtual machine. Disks and CD-ROMs can be either images, or real devices (or partitions on them). Note that if you give it a real disk, guest OS will have access to MBR and can/will overwrite it if you run qemu as root (since guest OS does not know it is running under emulator). The emulated virtual PC has an ne2000 Ethernet card, and Cyrus CL-GD5446 VGA card.
-- Aleksandar Milivojevic <amilivojevic@xxxxxx> Pollard Banknote Limited Systems Administrator 1499 Buffalo Place Tel: (204) 474-2323 ext 276 Winnipeg, MB R3T 1L7
