When I was little, getting ready for school in the fall meant buying loose-leaf paper, pencils, binders, all the usual kid stuff. These days, back-to-school apparently entails lots of digging through CD spindles and watching progress bars.
I’m starting school bright and early at 10:10 tomorrow (which means I really shouldn’t be up and blogging at 4:30 AM, but I’m not the sharpest brick in the load…) and I’m taking a 100% CIS course load. And my school apparently does EVERYTHING on Windows, which I don’t use; I’m a Linux and Mac OS X guy. That means I’d probably be wise to arrange handy access to a Windows system.
So… I spent a good chunk of the evening setting up a Windows XP virtual machine running under QEMU on my laptop. For the non-techies, this lets my computer pretend to have another computer inside of it, and that pretend computer runs Windows.
To get it all set up, I first had to rummage through the aforementioned CD spindles to find an old XP CD-ROM, install it onto a new hard disk image, download and install eleventy-hoojillion patches and updates via Windows Update, and get everything configured the way I like it.
Then it was back to the spindles to hunt down a set of Office 2000 discs. Yeah, it’s ancient. I don’t care. I’m not shelling out seven grand or whatever the hell MS charges for an upgrade; 2000 still gets the job done. Oh, and Windows can still get the nasties when it’s running in a virtual machine; better add some antivirus and anti-spyware. And Firefox. And Java. And Flash. And 7zip. And and and…
Anyways, the damn thing is finally set up acceptably. And it really runs pretty well; my machine has a 1.8 GHz Pentium-M, and the Windows VM feels about like a 1 GHz PIII. No speed demon, but entirely usable.
A few tips for anyone else looking to do this:
- Use the KQEMU kernel module accelerator. Yes, you’ll probably have to manually compile it against your kernel. Do it anyways. The performance improvement is worth it.
- Disable ACPI with the -no-acpi flag. That’s another big performance boost.
- Turn off all the eye candy and switch to 16-bit color inside Windows. MOAR speed!
- Use the -tftp flag to activate QEMU’s built-in TFTP server, so you can easily move files from Linux to Windows and back.
A pretty screenshot:
… and I’m hittin’ the sack.
I’ve run QEMU with Windows 98 (And Win 2000, and some Linux distros…). It’s actually a bit easier than trying to get it running on modern hardware. I never knew to turn off ACPI, but I’ll try that. I noticed some keyboard and mouse input problems when you give QEMU a higher priority (it won’t read all the input).
Does your college give out free licenses for software? Because some of them do that.
If you’re working with an existing image, go into Windows and disable ACPI there first, before disabling it in QEMU. Otherwise Windows won’t boot. Ask me how I found that out
My school doesn’t have a free software deal; they have a “special discount rate” at the bookstore, but it’s not really any better than, say, Newegg. Which is annoying, because my previous college had GREAT deals; XP Pro was $15.