How To: Windows XP Mode In...Ubuntu Linux? : Introduction...
Reviewed • 2 reviews • tomshardware.com
A detailed description on setting up Virtual Box in Ubuntu and installing a Windows XP Virtual Machine. I don't know quite what to make of this. There's probably quite a few people who want to run old XP programmes on new machines without shelling out for Windows 7 Professional or Ultimate, which are the only editions which support XP mode. I see 2 problems here.
1. Very few people own full retail licenses of XP. An OEM license is bound to the machine it shipped with so you'll run into problems installing it elsewhere whether you run it normally, dual booted or virtually. In fact most people don't even have a full OEM version of XP, just a Recovery disc or a Recovery partition. Getting this to run as a guest on another OS sounds daunting or impossible. I didn't even read it specified whether you had to have an XP Pro license or whether XP Home would do. Likewise, when it's suggested at the end that you could run Windows 7 virtually, it would have been helpful to inform whether this was possible under all licenses or just the most expensive ones. A lot of people wrote of their experience of using Windows 7 in the free Beta and RC releases. These were Ultimate versions and included functionality which will not be available in the less expensive versions.
2. There's a definite performance hit in running something virtually. If you want to run FPS 3D Games or have HD video encoding software which needs XP what about a dual boot solution?
Having said that though, this seems a good guide to setting up the software. Virtualisation is something I find really confusing and lots of description and screenshots is good for someone like me. This is something which would be fun to play with: you could try different Linux distros without messing with the boot loader. If you had a suitable copy of Windows you could set up virtual machines and experiment with disabling processes to get better performance by cutting out the bloat.
There's one thing mentioned in the article which really intrigued me. With Virtual Box you can enable something called PAE/NX. This enables your OS to address 4GB or more of system RAM on a 32 bit OS! I know the conventional wisdom is that this cannot be done, but I recently read an article by Mark Pickavance in Micromart saying he had believed in this memory cap for years but now thought it was less likely to be a technical limitation than something dreamt up by Microsoft to sell more software licenses. He pointed out that PAE had enabled some 32 bit Linux variants to access the full 4 GB of RAM.
So if you need to run Windows and are prepared to experiment with hacking away at the bloat and enabling PAE you might be able to improve performance by running it inside Linux!
1. Very few people own full retail licenses of XP. An OEM license is bound to the machine it shipped with so you'll run into problems installing it elsewhere whether you run it normally, dual booted or virtually. In fact most people don't even have a full OEM version of XP, just a Recovery disc or a Recovery partition. Getting this to run as a guest on another OS sounds daunting or impossible. I didn't even read it specified whether you had to have an XP Pro license or whether XP Home would do. Likewise, when it's suggested at the end that you could run Windows 7 virtually, it would have been helpful to inform whether this was possible under all licenses or just the most expensive ones. A lot of people wrote of their experience of using Windows 7 in the free Beta and RC releases. These were Ultimate versions and included functionality which will not be available in the less expensive versions.
2. There's a definite performance hit in running something virtually. If you want to run FPS 3D Games or have HD video encoding software which needs XP what about a dual boot solution?
Having said that though, this seems a good guide to setting up the software. Virtualisation is something I find really confusing and lots of description and screenshots is good for someone like me. This is something which would be fun to play with: you could try different Linux distros without messing with the boot loader. If you had a suitable copy of Windows you could set up virtual machines and experiment with disabling processes to get better performance by cutting out the bloat.
There's one thing mentioned in the article which really intrigued me. With Virtual Box you can enable something called PAE/NX. This enables your OS to address 4GB or more of system RAM on a 32 bit OS! I know the conventional wisdom is that this cannot be done, but I recently read an article by Mark Pickavance in Micromart saying he had believed in this memory cap for years but now thought it was less likely to be a technical limitation than something dreamt up by Microsoft to sell more software licenses. He pointed out that PAE had enabled some 32 bit Linux variants to access the full 4 GB of RAM.
So if you need to run Windows and are prepared to experiment with hacking away at the bloat and enabling PAE you might be able to improve performance by running it inside Linux!
