I would like some input from people about Xen for desktop virtualization. What are some others that I could look at. What I want is basically to run Zenwalk as my desktop on my new computer. Then I want to run a windows virutal system. That way I can still play my windows Games. But not have to worry about spyware or viruses.

Xen is fairly immarture still but many people are having good experiences with it. other alternatives include VMware and Parallels, but by the sound of it i think you're probably going to be fairly dissapointed. virtual machines emulate hardware for the guest system. the graphics capabilities of this emulated hardware is very basic, and conventionally programmed for compatability and stability, not performance and functionality. running any gamnes used to the luxuries of either DirectX or OpenGL will leave you very very frustrated, as (unless i'm very much mistaken and technology really is moving too fast for me) totally unable to offer these rendering and modelling capabilites.

So what then the best way to do what I want is a dual boot after all.

if you want to do real hardware intensive graphics then yes. of course you *could* run a linux vm inside windows but that's not too great a solution as windows as a host will naturally suck as it's so much more resource intensive than linux.

another potential though is to run a dual boot machine but also run somethign like vmware server under windows and access the linux partitions there. essentially your linux system would basically find totally different hardware when booted inside a vm compared to when you phsycail dual boot to it, which isn't great, but probably wouldn't really care either way. that's a potentially dangoerous solution but would provide more flexibility.

Thanks for the Help. I guess I am still going to have to run the games inside of windows. Dual boot is what it will be. Thanks acid_kewpie