Chris G wrote:
I was just looking around at alternatives to Vmware and saw VirtualBox, does it basically 'feel' like Vmware in the way it works? I.e. I can just install XP as a guest and run things in the guest while the rest of my Linux box is just that, a Linux box?
Yes to all that. It does some things better, others not so well, from what I can tell so far.
Stuff like shared folders (which the freebie VMWare stuff doesn't support) are there, for example.
If its home use and you go with the free-beer-not-speech version you get other stuff like USB support (inc USB2), client-server model like VMWare Server, including remote USB support. I've not tried any of that, so I have no idea how good it is, and it may be that by losing the free-as-in-speech you also lose the kernel update flexibility. (I'm very new to VirtualBox as I mentioned!)
VirtualBox has downloads for Fedora if you want to try it: http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
While Access is my major need there's enough other bits and pieces (e.g. web sites that only work with IE, odd word documents that won't open in OO) that a 'real' Windows XP is the easiest solution.
IE on Wine is easy (and means you can have IE6 and IE7's rendering engines on the same PC for development tests), but I wouldn't know about VirtualBox and VMWare if I didn't know where you were coming from!