As a person who uses Linux regularly, often I am asked about my opinions about other operating systems, especially those coming from large companies located in Redmond, Washington. Here's the deal.

VirtualBox is a general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware. Targeted at server, desktop and embedded use, it is a professional-quality virtualization solution that is also Open Source Software.

For those times when you absolutely must still run Windows XP, one safer way of doing it is to run XP in a virtual machine using the Oracle VirtualBox hypervisor on Linux Mint.

VirtualBox is flexible enough to handle many types of 32-bit and 64-bit configurations. If you need to run a 32-bit version of XP in a 64-bit host, you can do that without any problems.