Re: Is Xen for Stable/Unstable distro a good idea?
Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
> I've followed this thread a bit and maybe you all can help me. I've
> got a winxp partition that I have to boot into only occaisionally to
> get some archived data from an old quickbooks file. Can I
> use one of these solutions to do that?
QEMU can run WinXP, although the performance will be quite poor, unless
you install a proprietary accelerator module (it cannot be distributed
with Debian, so you will have to do it manually).
As I have already mentioned, QEMU can run of real file systems, but an
operating system must be able to deal with hardware changes. WinXP is
not really good at that, so it may or may not work. A thing to remember
is that you should run it in snapshot mode (changes to a file system are
not written onto a disk), in case something goes wrong.
The best thing to do would be to install the OS onto a disk image (or to
a real partition, if you really want to) trough QEMU. You can install
from a real CD, or from a CD image. It is really as easy as it sounds.
QEMU offers a lot of options for sharing data between host and guest OS.
For example you can set up SMB network, use a directory as a drive etc.
Some GUI front-ends also exist, if you are not familiar with QEMU
command line options. None of them are in Debian yet, but here is the list:
KDE:
http://kqemu.sourceforge.net/
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/kqemu/kqemu-0.3Alpha.tgz?download
GTK+:
https://gna.org/projects/qemulaunch
http://svn.gna.org/daily/qemulaunch-snapshot.tar.gz
> or am I better waiting for wine to support quickbooks (not yet afaik).
Are you sure? I checked Wine AppDB and it does contain it. Does not mean
that it does run, but at least it is a known application. You could also
try running it from real WinXP partition, if it does not work stand-alone.
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