Quote Originally Posted by johnrw
...So people need VMware workstation to make the XP "appliance"...
Actually, they don't. I've made XP and Vista and even Wn98 virtual machines without the use of Workstation at all. The VMX file is just a text file that is very easily edited. But no need to even break out a text editor; there are websites and tools that will make the vmx file for you. One such website is easyvmx.com , which will make a vmx file to your specifications. But the best tool that I found so far is one that you don't have to keep going back to the Internet for each time that you want to make a few changes to the vm called VMX Builder. It lets you create and edit VMX files with a nice GUI based editor.

These are not the only ways to build a vmx file for free. You could simply use VMware's free VMserver, which makes vmx files, but it's overkill for most simple vmx files. And the simplest way of all might be just to take any virtual machine that you already have, boot it, tell the virtual machine to go into it's virtual BIOS so that you can boot from CD or DVD rather than hard disk, insert a bootable install CD into your drive and install something off of the bootable disk, completely formatting and overwriting your old virtual disk in the process! This is a bit crude, since you retain the old VM's settings such as memory and disk size, but it does work. I've install Debian from the net-install CD this way, just to prove that I could do it.