On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 2:20 PM, Frank Cox <theatre at melvilletheatre.com> wrote: > I may have a need to run some version of Windows (XP?) on my desktop. > > As this will likely be a short-term thing, and since I have never used Windows, I would like to do this in the most painless way possible. A method that requires me to make the least changes to my Centos computer would be nice, since I'll probably want to back it out again later. > > I have never used any of the current virtualization technologies, so it's all new to me. > > My objective is to have Window run in a window on my desktop. I don't want to dual-boot my computer. > > I was looking at virtualbox. Is this the best approach? I get the impression that there are special kernel modules that are required for virtualbox, but if I install dkms then that will be automatically handled for me whenever there is a kernel upgrade. Install dkms, install the virtualbox repo, install virtualbox rpms, set up image, done. Is that all there is to it? Would something other than virtualbox be better? > > Any recommendations or suggestions will be appreciated. Virtualbox will work, but if you want to stick to stock packages and aren't concerned about running your images on other types of hosts, try KVM first. Yum groupinstall Virtualization "Virtualization Client" "Virtualization Platform" "Virtualization Tools" might be overkill but should have everything you need. And then you'll find the GUI under Applications ->System Tools -> Virtual Machine Manager. If you want to give the guest VM bridged access to your NIC, you also need the bridge-utils package and have to move your host network setup to the bridge device. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com