this is my idea, it may have been talked about before.

Cant we just install, VMware Workstation and install windows from there.

any comments?

KawaXbox

Under Linux? The xbox just isn't powerful enough.

What do you mean, it's not powerful enough? VMWare works fine on Linux on the Xbox, and you can indeed install any version of windows you like as long as it's happy to run with no more than about 32-48MB of ram (so, probably not XP unless you do some serious trimming-down). If you use an absolutely minimal Linux setup with nothing running other than vmware you can probably manage to have 40MB physical ram left over.

Windows 98 should work just fine, since VMWare is considerably faster than QEMU (since it's only virtualising, and not emulating, the hardware).

Really? I would have thought that VMWare would have used considerably more resources than QEmu. When I run VMWare on my PC, it takes up well over 64mb of RAM... Even just running DSL.

i think what actually vmware does is, that it shares the ram, for example i have installed it on my windows xp pc with 1024MB of ram and it halves it making it 512MB to share with the other OS.

i will defitnetly try this though.

KawaXbox

VMWare might use slightly more RAM, but not significantly. It will use a lot less CPU time, which is more useful

VMWare's minimum memory requirement is the amount of memory you want to give to the guest OS (say, 32MB for a small win98 system or a small linux) plus about 5-10% for various bookkeeping stuff (shadowed page tables, other horrible torturous hackery which is required because x86 is such a crock of shite for virtualisation), plus the size of VMware itself, and then maybe a bit spare

QEMU will use memory in a similar pattern - it still needs 32MB of ram at least if the guest OS is going to appear to have 32MB.. it might have a little less overhead (because it will, e.g. emulate the guest's MMU using the guest's own pagetables, instead of VMWare having to keep a shadow copy of them all so that the real hardware MMU can do it safely) but not a lot.

I've successfully run VMWare on my xbox under Gentoo, it works just fine and is certainly no *slower* than QEMU

If it uses over 64MB of ram to run DSL on your Windows machine, you'll probably find the virtual machine is configured to have.. yep, 64MB of ram You can undoubtedly crank that way down if you're just firing up DSL and not doing anything complicated. (though, a much cooler and MUCH faster way to run Linux on Windows is to use coLinux, which actually lets a full Linux kernel run natively on the hardware at the same time as the Windows kernel via *really* cunning device driver hackery. No emulation, no virtualisation, very fast indeed but still eats up RAM)