The April issue of Linux Format (#117) has an excellent tutorial on Qemu. It demonstrates how to use Qemu to run various operating systems in a virtual environment. This is quite nice but as emulators go, Qemu is rather slow. If you use it, I would strongly recommend using the companion program kqemu. This will speed up the virtual machine considerably. What really got my interest is that Qemu has the ability to create virtual disks for use by the VMware products. I have tinkered with Sun’s Virtualbox before, with only limited success. An article here was just to hard to resist another try at running Windows in a virtual machine. This article will document my success with this emulator and give you a few tips on improving it.

There are a few prerequisites should you care to do this. First you will need an image of a Windows XP install disk. Yes, your computer came with Windows installed. did the friendly folks at Microsoft give you an install disk? No… at best you have a restore disk, good only on your machine and not of much use for this project. So head on over to a bittorrent P2P site and grab a pirate copy. Second you will need a computer with enough memory. Remember, you will be running two operating systems simultaneously. If you have  1GB that will be enough for two 512MB machines. Windows XP will run in a 256MB machine but not quite as well as in a larger one. Ubunu is comfortable in 256MG.

Once again, we will will start with these instructions. Print them out. You will need to install Qemu and VMware Player. Notice that the instructions provide two VMX files. The first is a general configuration that will rcognize a physical CD-ROM drive. The second substitutes an install image for the drive. Copy and paste the second to a text file and change the file extention to .vmx. Edit the file so that the name of the .iso file matches the name of your image. Copy your image to the same directory as the vmx file. If you have enough memory bump up the memory size from 256MB to 512MB. C Create a .vmdk file with Qemu and place it in the same directory. Note: create a large disk file, ay 20GB. The actual file created will actually be small. It will have the ability to grow to the specified size as you add to it. Open VMware player and “run” the VMX file. Your installation of XP should take off. Congratulations! You have created a Windows virtual Machine.

Important! The freeware VMplayer does not have the ability to take snapshots! Virual machines are delicate. If you crash it, there is little chance of recovery. The workaround is to copy your installation folder to another location every time you make a significant change. do this NOW! And do it again after each milestone that follow.

VMware has a package called Guest Tools. In stallation of these tools enhances performance and enables extra features including the ability to change screen resolution and the ability to share folders. Follow the instructions here to get them installed. The author is a bit brief on how to get the tools installed into your virtual machine. What I did is to edit the .vmx file changing the name of the install image to “windows.iso”. I copied windows.iso to my virtual machine directory. When I “played” my virtual machine it appeared. Another idea is to mount the windows.iso and copy the files to a flash drive. This is not tested.

At this point you will want to edit your .vmx file to the first configuration in the original article replacing the image file with the code needed to make your physical device accessable. Many configurations are possible. Take a look at easyvmx.com for an online VMX generator.

Do you want some shared folders? follow these unstructions. My biggest problem with this was finding the shared folders in Windows after creating them. I do not blame Windows for this, it’s simply my own unfamiliarity with networking and file sharing. Do it if you like it.

At this point we have a pretty good working virtual XP machine. We need some software. Being Windows you’ll need some antivirus thing. I installed Avira but Avast and AVG are equally good choices. You’ll want a better browser than IE so install either Firefox or Chrome.

A final note. I would really like to delete my dual booting XP partition whose only purpose is to host iTunes. ITunes is the only way to keep my iPod touch firmware up to date. So, of course, I installed iTunes into my virtual machine. It crashed, leaving my machine corrupted. I had to restore from a backup. Oh well, tomorrow is another day.