I found an old Olympus m:robe iPod pretender this morning and wouldn't have been surprised if my Ubuntu Feisty 64bit distro's various media players recognised it but alas, no joy. After some piling around the web, I could only find forum posts lamenting its incompatibility with Linux in general. But if it isn't compatible with Linux...
I had a Window XP disc kicking about so I gave VirtualBox a go. Selecting it for install in Automatix, it took a couple of minutes to download and install. I opened it, created a new 10GB disk image, popped in the XP disc and powered up the virtual box. I was straight into the Windows installation routine and 45 minutes later, I had a full installation running with the network card and CD drive functioning. It was then a simple matter of selecting which USB device to allow (the m:robe mp3 player) and install the horrific Olympus iTunesy software and Bob had become my uncle. Performance is first rate - I can watch DVDs with Windows media player - and cloning the image is as easy as copying a file.
This was by far my best virtualisation experience. And it's free!
I think I might install BeOS 
i installed this the other day too. i was surprised at how fast it was to install windows xp pro (faster than vmware i think). booting windows xp took about 20 seconds longer than vmware though, once i'd installed pidgim im, comodo firewall on both of the images. still, really good tool - there's no bridged networking in the default distrib, but there's a script out there somewhere.
on another windows xp note, i installed a theme patch (it overwrites a ms system file to allow 3rd party themes) a gnome windows style, and another patch which replaces the windows icons with tango ones: it's quite nice :)
