Last week, an unfortunate turn of event forced me to flirt with an old flame. It goes without saying, an old flame is and old flame for conceivably good reasons. Flirting with an old flame is a good way to invite grief and disaster. However, in this instance, the unfortunate turn of event was absolutely unavoidable. It was something that was completely out of my control.
Alrighty then …
The misleading paragraph above (this post’s except) has probably tricked you into clicking the link to read more. Let me come clean with the disappointment now.
This post, most probably, has nothing to do with what you thought it would be.
Muah ha ha haaa 
More than two years ago, I got fed up with trashy, risky, and bloated Windows XP, and went searching for something better.
I discovered Ubuntu. It was right after released of Dapper Drake (6.06). I attempted to install it in one PC, but after spending a day on it, I gave up. It just refused to install in my PC. Six months later, I tried again and succeeded with Edgy Eft (6.10). For a while, I ran two OSes (I still have WinXP in another PC).
A year after that, when Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) was released, I finally ditched WinXP completely, and have Ubuntu in all my PCs. Thus, goodbye WinXP. It has been a love-hate relationship, but I found something much better.
Until last week.
An unfortunate event forced me to flirt with WinXP again. In brief, it went like this: I need to run a specific Windows application; let’s pretend to call this thing EvilApps. Normally, I wouldn’t touch EvilApps with a twelve-foot pole; I avoided such proprietary trap by looking for a Linux alternative application. But this time, I can’t. Due to external factors out of my control (which I don’t want to explain here), I am absolutely forced to use EvilApps only. No discussion, end of story. Rats!
A possible way out is to run EvilApps in WINE. Unfortunately, EvilApps won’t even install itself in WINE. Double rats!
With a heavy heart, I digged out the old WinXP install disc from storage. When I said old, it’s old as in pre-any-service-pack old. Immediately, I ran into multiple problems/things to think about.
My main work computer has been an eeePC 900 for a while now. Ideally, I wanted to install WinXP on it. But, the big unknown: is that even doable? Would the eeePC 900MHz slow processor crapped out? Triple rats!
Then, there is the problem with disk storage. Ubuntu Intrepid is currently taking up 4GB of the primary SSD. I would only be able to install WinXP in the slower secondary SSD. Rats! Rats! Rats! Rats!
Arguable, a fresh old WinXP install is pretty zippy. The problem is the load of crap that need to be put on top of it. And it is not possible to skip the load of crap. It needs to be heavily protected, or run the risk of getting hacked, infested, and turned into a botnet zombie. It’s like having unsafe sex, fun while it lasted but eventually you would ran into deep trouble.
You need firewall, anti-virus and anti-spyware. You need to patched everything, and ended up with a 500lb gorilla.
Anyway, I eventually ruled out dual booting. Instead, I started experimenting with virtualisation. The last time, I played around with Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM). It worked fine, but networking set-up was a pain-in-the-ass. But that was a while back (a year ago?) In any case, I can’t use KVM now because the eeePC 900 lame Celeron processor does not support hardware virtualisation. Therefore, this time around, I tried VirtualBox.
VirtualBox was a blast. It was easy to install and use. Creating a WinXP guest machine was straightforward. The freshly installed WinXP guest unexpectedly booted up in about 40 seconds, and worked seamlessly. Virtual NAT worked out-of-the-box. At the moment, I allocated only 192MB of RAM to the WinXP guest, and it is still pretty zippy. The only slowdown I observed was whenever there was a prolonged disk access. This was probably due to the slow secondary SSD (a problem I have seen before when I had Ubuntu Intrepid in a secondary SSD partition). I have not tried to run EvilApps yet, so the memory requirement might have to be tweaked later.
Gratuitous Compiz Cube screenshot:
Why would virtualised WinXP be better than dual boot? Because I only wanted to run EvilApps. Because it’s extremely easy to make a back-up image of a fresh install and restore to it at any time (I am referring to the “Snapshot” feature of VirtualBox).
Thus, my main security/anti-bloat protocol is constant revert to fresh install state. Got infected? Revert to the snapshot and immediately, it’s as good as new. WinXP turned bloated and slowed down since install? Revert to the snapshot. Got hacked? Revert to the snapshot.
Of course, it would be better to also secure any network pipe linking the WinXP guest to the internet. I am thinking of running EtherApe to monitor the traffic in the pipe. The thing I learned from years of using WinXP was that the OS itself could be your worst enemy. So, by putting a spy on the spy OS, I could hopefully see any attempt at tomfoolery.
It remained to be seen if this is a good approach but I am hopeful. I was initially doubtful that the little slow eeePC 900 could take the load, but I was amazed that it stood up pretty well.
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