Fedora 8

With Fedora 8 being the host, Create a user that will login into Windows XP Pro directly so a family member doesn't need to figure out how to work with Vmware Player. By the way it could be any other operating system that is supported by vmware.

Also by using a light weight windows manager you should get better performance from the virtual machine.

Install a light weight windows manager.
yum install icewm

Hopefully you already have Vmware Player already installed. You could also try one of Vmware other products but you will have to change from vmplayer to something else, Example: vmware

Create a new user for your family member. Example: bob

Create a file in bob's home directory /home/bob/.xsession
Yes there is a dot in front of xsession
vi /home/bob/.xsession

Add this information to the file.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
/usr/bin/icewm &
sleep 3
exec /usr/bin/vmplayer -X /home/bob/VirtualMachine/vm.vmx

Make the file executable
chmod +x .xsession

Make sure it is owned by bob
chown bob.bob /home/bob/.xsession

Disable Menu in Icewm

Add a file to the /home/bob/.icewm/ directory called preferences

vi /home/bob/.icewm/preferences

Add this information to the file.

ShowTaskBar=0
UseRootButtons=0

Now when someone login there will be no menu bar.

Make sure it is owned by bob
chown bob.bob /home/bob/.icewm/preferences

What should happen

So when your at Fedora's login manager, Login with bob and you should see Windows XP startup. When you shutdown Windows XP you should go back to Fedora's login manager.

Some of the information was taken from Linux Format LXF106 June 2008. They did the setup with VirtualBox and EvilWM.