I've got VMWare running fairly nicely now. It was a bit of a mission to get it going now.

Firstly, I don't want to register it because (as of yet) I still don't like it enough to pay money, and Workstation requires that I pay money. That left me with the option of using Player, which I installed from Portage. I had to make a virtual machine to run with Player, but you need Workstation and therefore to pay for that. There are a few online VM generators, but I never had a lot of success with those.

So to make the VM, I decided to install QEMU, an open source emulator with the capability of making one. The problem is that QEMU won't compile under gcc4 because of changes to the compiler from gcc3. So I installed gcc-3.4.6, and switched to the proper profile and gave QEMU a try with portage again. Portage didn't seem to like that the kernel was compiled with a different compiler to the current one, so I tried the binary on the website. The binary had trouble loading some of the libraries that I didn't have installed.

Then I tried the source from the website, and after a few attempts at finding the right ./configure I managed to get it compiled and installed and working. I used QEMU to generate an xp.vmx and install XP, and was quite able to boot into XP running the VM with Player.

It's a bit faster that it was last time I tried it, and a lot more stable too. That was probably caused by a combination of using 64 bit Linux and me not really knowing what I was doing. I've got bridged networking, sound and graphics hardware acceleration working too. Still a bit much overhead for my liking, but I think I can deal.