Well, you answered my post #63. But the more I think about it the less intrigued I am about running a virtual Ubuntu over Windows XP.
XP’s the system I want to migrate from. It’s slow & clunky compared to Ubuntu. It would make more sense to make my hard drive a Linux partition and run a minimal install of XP in order to get the few applications I need.
However, some questions come up: 1) If I’m running XP in a virtual space, do I still need all the security features like anti-virus, firewall, spamware, etc, even though I’d only be using it to port applications over to Ubuntu? 2) How does a virtual version of XP handle hardware drivers? Will it recognize my sound/video card, printers and such? I ask this because I use Audacity for music and in Windows it recognizes sound coming from the Internet; in Ubuntu it doesn’t. (But that’s another issue).
These are some things I’ll have to resolve before I go either route.
Yeah it makes more sense to install Linux on your hard drive and then run a virtualized minimal XP (something like Windows 2000 or “Tiny XP” which is a minimalistic customized Windows XP) in something like Virtual Box.
To get your network working with a Virtual Box-virtualized WinXP, you set up your virtual machine and then on the right you will see the word Network in blue. Click on it, and checkmark the box beside “Enable Network Adapter”. For ethernet, the program emulates an AMD PCnet card.
To enable sound, you click on the word Audio in blue, and then checkmark the box beside “Enable Audio”, and then you choose what audio driver to use (Null, ALSA, OSS). I always choose Null Audio Driver. For audio, Virtual Box emulates an Intel ICH AC’97 device.
Chances are Virtual Box will not recognize your video card. For video/display, every installation of Virtual Box emulates a standard VESA card with 8 MB video RAM, but that number can be adjusted to up to 128 MB.
But on my laptop with 512 MB RAM, VirtualBox runs just fine. It runs maybe 95% native speed. I also have a desktop that has a Pentium 4 3.0 GHz CPU with 1 GB RAM with Ubuntu, and running Tiny XP on there is basically as fast as it would run natively.
And with Virtual Box, you should be able to use USB devices with it. Not sure if printers will work with it.
Just keep in mind that Virtual Box isn’t meant to be a 100% solution to run Windows. It’s made really just for the “essential” Windows apps (IE, and so on). Audacity should run fine on there.