Even though Debian-based distros aren’t supported “officially”, I thought it would be as simple as converting the rpm to deb with alien, but it wasn’t, so I had to get the tarball. Couldn’t get the right kernel headers to save my soul, but finally figured it out. Got the right compiler and got it installed, but you can’t use the configuration script on Debian-based distros, so I had to get something called the “any-any update”, and got the configuration working. VMware is then good to go, but the virtual machine won’t boot from the XP CD. Oookay, GnomeBaker can make an image of it and I’ll change the CD drive to mount the ISO instead of the physical drive. Worked fine and installed fine, but didn’t pick up the network card even though mine’s about as generic as it gets, and wired, too. Finally figured that one out (a VMware thang), but the screen resolution was still wrong, and I had to hunt down the option for that as well because it was through VMware, not Win. All good to go now, though–XP is up and running (using VMware video driver, though, ’cause I saw some threads about problems with nVidia drivers and decided not to bother because I don’t care about hardware acceleration).

Why did I install XP when I have already dual-boot, don’t use Win much at all and knew it wouldn’t be as easy as it had been on SuSE with the rpm? Some things you do just because you CAN. 🙂