Running Windows under Linux

[Oxygen]

I know that Windows can be made to run inside Linux, which involved getting WMware or QEMU and installing a sort of fake Windows. I've for a few questions.

1. Is it possible to run a copy of Windows under Linux that's already installed on a hard drive partition?

2. What drawbacks are there?

3. Do any features that normally work on Windows not work during emulation?

[Thrillhouse]

1. Is it possible to run a copy of Windows under Linux that's already installed on a hard drive partition?

It's possible but it won't be easy. Here is a link I found of someone running Gentoo and using their Windows partition in a virtual machine. It is specific to Gentoo but the fundamental method will be the same no matter what distro you're using. You can start there.

2. What drawbacks are there?

The performance of the virtual machine will not be as good as if you were actually running it as a live system, without virtualization. But besides that, there shouldn't be too much difference between using a regular virtual machine and using your WIndows partition as a virtual machine.

3. Do any features that normally work on Windows not work during emulation?

3D acceleration is not yet integrated into VMware's products (as far as I know). So, if you're looking to do some intense gaming on your VM, you might run into some problems but that's pretty much it. Everything else works just as it would normally.

[surya.theSun]

Thanks for the link. It is helpful

[Oxygen]

I'm a bit lost on where the stuff has to go. Where do I put 'WindowsXP.vmdk'?

[Oxygen]

I've ran into a problem:

I tried installing vmware through apt-get and it failed, so I removed it. And I tried doing it from the tarball, but the problem I get is when I run the install script, it says it's already installed... what do I have to delete?