Reformed Musings
Puritan Board Freshman
Would you recommend using Virtual Server (which is supposedly now free) to do this? I understand that it is dependent on Windows.
Virtual PC is currently a Windows product, runs on WinXP Pro SP2, and it is free. The download page is here.
Since it runs on WinXP or Vista, it doesn't help you run WinXP under Linux.
The free Linux program that I had in mind was QEMU. Although it is reported to be slower than VMWare, there is another utility (KQEMU) to help speed it up a bit. VMWare isn't cheap, so QEMU may be worth a try to see if it is good enough.
Another approach is to create the VM in QEMU, then run it thereafter in the free VMPlayer. That seems to be the best approach if you don't do enough virtualization to justify WMWorkstation's extra capabilities.