VMWare Workstation install

Dear Rich, Thanks for the mentioning KVM. If this stands for the Kernel Virtual
    Machine, I'd expect high performance. Though graphics' speed is not a point,
    I do need some graphics, got to check it. Clonezilla is another
good news for me.
    However, I wonder how stable (crash free) KVM could be with proprietary,
    ie. NVidia graphics drivers.

Dear Zhu, Thank you for the link. I'm going to check this out. Bit
afraid, as they
    seem volatile and little hackish workarounds. I hope one day they the VMWare
    pkgs get stabilized -contrary to the obvious difficulties. As for
speed, few years
    back I remember WS took little more than 10 % CPU load when the WinXP
    guest was idle. Do you mean VB would cost more than that?

Dear Duncan, MS-based guest is a good point, thanks for pointing this out.
    I expected VM-s are just HW emus, thus OS is indifferent. Nice to know that
    KVM is one more nonproprietary option.

Best regards,
  toma