[lug] Favorite Distro for Hosting guest OS like Windows7?

[Lori Reed]

I can't speak to Windows 7, but I have a similar vintage desktop (P4, 
3.2 GHz, 2 Hyperthreads, no virtualization enhancements) and I have no 
trouble running Win-XP with Sun's VirtualBox. With this configuration, 
XP runs faster than it did in native mode on my old 1.2 GHz desktop.

I allow Win-XP 1 GB of RAM to run in, Win-7 may require more.

Lori

siegfried wrote:
> Are there any distros that are better suited for hosting guest OS's (like
> windows 7) than other distros?
> 
> I have a 2005 machine and I want to install linux to host windows 7. I need
> windows 7 to run Visual Studio 2010.
> 
> According a free windows program I got from www.cpuid.com I have an Intel
> Pentium 4 640 Prescott 3.2 Ghz. Family F, Model 4 Stepping 3 Ext Family F
> Ext. Model 4 Revision NO. Instructions: MMX, SSE (1,2,3), EM64T. 
> 
> I think this is slightly too old to have that special firmware enhancement
> to better accommodate virtualization. What is the name of that feature?
> Virtualization extensions? Does the absence of virtualization extensions
> affect my choice of virtual box or VMWare or Fedora KVM?
> 
> I want to run virtualization to run windows and once a month make a backup
> snapshot or maybe rollback to a pristine guest. (Development activity tends
> to muck things up quickly with lots of versions of tomcat, apache httpd,
> mysql etc...) This will be a development machine for IIS/Apache HTTPD,
> Java/Eclipse and C# and oracle and mysql database and even MS SQL and visual
> studio 2010. I want to install oracle on the linux and talk to it from the
> Window7 guest.
> 
> Thanks,
> Siegfried