From the guests viewpoint, it appears to be running on its very own PC, but its actually running within a limited virtual sub-system of your PC, a VM.

The VM, in turn, is managed by a program called a hypervisor.

There are many excellent desktop hypervisors for Linux such as VMware Player, Linuxs built in Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM), and my own favorite, Oracles free VirtualBox.

I prefer VirtualBox because its the easiest to set up and run VMs on.

As security holes start to appear in XP in its retirement, those holes will also appear in XP running on a VM.

In my experience, you could squeeze XP on top of Linux Mint and VirtualBox on a system with 1GB of RAM, but its going to be ugly.

You want at least 2GBs of RAM and a 1GHz AMD or Intel processor.

What I can tell you is that when you run XP on VirtualBox you get the complete XP experience.

It just happens to be running on top of Linux instead of the native hardware.

Once you get comfortable with running two operating systems at once, this can be very handy.

Just be wary of any XP programs that require network access, since thats the way the hackers will be trying to get to your virtual XP system just as if were running normally on a PC.

By keeping XP on a VM, instead of running constantly on a PC, youll be more conscious of running it rather than falling into the dangerous habit of running XP like there will still be patches coming.

By running XP in a VM only when you must for special applications, you can start breaking yourself of the dangerous XP habit.

Over time, youll find yourself running more and more of your day-to-day work on Linux, and eventually you can give up Windows once and for all.

You also agree to the Terms of Use and acknowledge the data collection and usage practices outlined in our Privacy Policy.

Install Windows Xp In Virtualbox