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.
