WinXP on anotther partition running as guest OS: is it possible (for free)?

[John Summerfield]

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.