I am setting up TYPO3-Neos on windows XP and stucked here at the following error.
Flow does not support Windows versions older than Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 (Error #1312463704).
Had a research on internet and read a comment on this website stating "you can't use FLOW3 on Windows XP. FLOW3 uses (stupidly, I'd say) function symlink, that isn't available on Windows XP."
After a little more googling, found here on wikipedia,says that "A third-party driver is available to enable symbolic links on Windows XP".
So is there any real solution to this symlink issue with Windows XP.
Windows XP support was officially dropped with this issue: http://forge.typo3.org/issues/11683.
Even if you make the symlink() PHP command working on your Windows XP, e.g. with third-party libraries, FLOW won't work because the Windows version check is integrated in the bootstrap:
http://forge.typo3.org/projects/package-typo3-flow/repository/revisions/0c539bd6d920ff656531da85fa87619ee7150648/diff/Classes/Core/Bootstrap.php
I would suggest using a Vagrant box with a Linux VM. Thomas Layh prepared a Vagrant box with TYPO3 Flow which can be found on https://github.com/tlayh/vagrant-typo3flow.
A manual is included in the Readme. What the readme doesn't say is that you first need to install VirtualBox for Windows (to be found on https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads). You also have to run "vagrant plugin install vagrant-librarian-chef" after step 2 and skip step 3 on Windows.