[ale] Virtualbox in a junky home network

[Dustin Strickland]

I wanted to ask a quick question before I invest the time in trying to
figure out how to make it work. Before I begin I would like to throw two
things out there. One, I am broke and use a bunch of bizarre second-hand
thrown-together machines for my home network. Two, I still play DooM. I've
gotten my younger brother into it and he's started to take an interest in
making maps. However, there is no quality software for DooM map-making on
Linux and the community-standard program for Windows doesn't run under WINE.

Now, I shall elaborate a bit on that first point. My home network is pretty
simple other than using hideously outdated hardware. I have a main
desktop(which might be analogous to a workstation in another setup),
running Linux Mint 15 KDE on a Core 2 Quad Q8200. Good enough, but it's
easy to bog down since I'm not the only one in the house that uses it. This
is the one I use for personal storage, all other Linux PCs in the house
grab /home from here. I'm also using an old I-don't-even-know-what with LM
XFCE 14 on a Pentium 4 dual-core as a headless NFS server for all of the
DooM mods we have, and several other irrelevant purposes. There are also my
2 old P3 Latitudes running Salix LXDE and my mom's Win7 Compaq which don't
contribute anything to the network.

The machine I want to focus on is the one I haven't yet mentioned. It was,
at one point in time, a laptop. And then it wasn't. And then it was bolted
into the drywall... And then in a monitor case. And then in an ASUS
motherboard box. Now, I've rigged up one final case, took the LCD off and
have been running it as a headless media server. I've elected this machine
to also take care of running XP in Virtualbox so that my brother can make
his maps. However, I've never run any VM software before, so I'm not
too(read:not at all) familiar with the limitations of it, including what
type of integration you could have with the host OS.

Ideally, I would be able to connect through RDP or some other means to run
the program, do the dirty work, and save it. It would then be available on
the Pentium machine's DooM mod NFS, and thus to every other machine.
Whichever one is convenient to use at the moment would be able to test the
map locally, rather than having run the game on the VM, which I see as
slow, inefficient, and ugly(as it would require me having scattered copies
of mods everywhere). Would such a setup be possible?
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