Setting up a VM to run XP in an up-to-date F12 box?

[Tom Horsley]

On Sat, 28 Nov 2009 06:49:44 -0800 (PST)
Mike Cloaked wrote:

> Interesting replies - thank you - but noticeable that the fedora provided
> facility of kvm has been mentioned by no-one!

I'm running XP under KVM (obviously you need KVM capable hardware),
and it works fine, but when installing under fedora 11, the
virt-manager tool didn't create an ACPI capable KVM, so I couldn't
shutdown the machine via normal shutdown menu item. I eventually
re-installed, telling virt-manager I was installing vista (which
did get ACPI).

I run smb on fedora and auto mount a network file system in the
XP box to get access to more storage than the small virtual
disk I setup during the install.

The virt-manager tool does support USB pass-through, but my one
attempt to test it didn't work very well. I tried passing my
all-in-one HP photosmart device to it, and XP just bluescreened
randomly whenever it was connected :-).

You also don't get much in the way of emulated video. I tried
accessing ESPN-360 since they don't support linux, and the
installer said the video wasn't good enough.

As far as access to the outside world goes, I destroyed the
default NAT based network, and created a bridge, which works
much better for my - my virtual machines act just like any
other machines in my local network.