wahlau's online hut

yes, after seeing many attempts everywhere, i got itchy and decided to install windows XP on my Ubuntu Breezy using qemu. It is not that difficult anyway, so i would just write down simple instructions that looks the same everywhere :)

Qemu installation
installation under Ubuntu(or and Debian derivative) is relative simple. Apt-get will do most of the job.

wahlau@mybox:/opt/qemu$ sudo apt-get install qemu 

and soon you are ready to run :) 

Getting ready
you have choices between the good old dd or qemu-img to prepare the guest os image. for dd,

wahlau@mybox:/opt/qemu$ dd of=xp.img bs=1024 seek=1500000 count=0
  0+0 records in
  0+0 records out
  0 bytes transferred in 1*10-9 seconds (0 bytes/sec)

and if you want something simpler, try this

wahlau@mybox: /opt/qemu$ qemu-img create xp.img 3500M

the qemu image is there with the name xp.img. You can of course name it anything you like, like pantat.img :)

somehow the parameter 3.5G does not work for me, so i just use 3500M instead. Another how-to uses 3.5G though...

Installation time!

yeah, for the impatient ones, start your engineinstallation with the following command:

wahlau@mybox:/opt/qemu$ qemu -boot d -cdrom /dev/scd0 -hda xp.img -localtime

it depends on your computer's configuration to decide on your parameters. For my thinkpad i need to specify the device path to my dvdrom, since the default (i assume /dev/cdrom) won't work. for more info on the available commands and parameters, try qemu and man qemu.

as noted in Graham's how-to, the Windows XP installation will actually just hang, making you think why did the restarting of windows take so long. After 30 minutes of waiting, i just simply abort the process by CTRL-Break at my console, and restart the installation. Bingo! now it manage to go beyond the "windows is restarting" stage. The installation process is still slow (it is already another 30 minutes, and i am only at 41% data copying. time to make coffee) but i think everyone knows that. :)

update:
2006.02.14:
quick changes. reinstalled breezy (long story here) and now installed qemu with kqemu using insQEMU.sh from Nando, and now heading off for a Win2k installation with some instruction from David.

2006.07.06:

tried installing windows 98. followed some instructions here. If you don't have a boot floppy image, go download it here. after that follow instruction from Torben. You should be able to get it done.

References:
1. Qemu main site: http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/ 

2. Installing Windows XP under Debian with QEMU: http://www.crazysquirrel.com/computing/debian/xp-under-debian-with-qemu.jspx

3. Qemu on FreeBSD: http://www.iosn.net/Members/kaeru/articles/freebsd/qemu/index_html

4. qemu on OpenSuse: http://www.k4ml.com/node/160

5. How to install QEmu on Ubuntu Linux: http://www.codepoets.co.uk/docs/qemu_windows2000_on_ubuntu_linux_howto 

6. Nando's good insQEMU.sh: http://oui.com.br/n/content.php?article.23

7. Using QEMU with Win98: http://swampthing.dk/~tsj/hardware/DELL_DIMENSION_8100/qemu/