Best low resource host OS?

[drunken_monkey]

I am a noob here so dont be rough on me if i am acting like a noob or asking questions like a noob cause i am a noob

i have used MS virtual PC in the past so i have some understanding / experience of the virtualizing. I have a netbook (samsung N150 w Win XP) maxed at 2GB ram. i would like to run a host OS that requires few resources so i can dedicate remaining resources to VMs. Would like to try Fedora, win 8, etc as guest OS's, and use XP as a permanent guest.

Any thoughts on a host OS?


edit: i appreciate the suggestions offered, thank you

[stefan.becker]

If you want to use this approach for multimedia or gaming in the guest, then this approach is senseless.

If you have other scenarios, post them. Else nobnody can help you.

[mpack]

I don't think you'll find anything much better than the XP host your profile says you are already using. If you go through the XP task list and eliminate redundant resource hogs then XP can be made quite lean and mean. I'm using an XP host right now, fully functional (Royale theme), it typically has 17 processes running when idle, consuming about ~150MB of physical RAM, ~0-2% CPU, and <2GB of disk space, including swap file. The remainder of my 4GB RAM, CPU and disk space is available to apps, including VBox.