I’m now *really* enjoying my newly upgraded Ubuntu system. Since I have hardware that supports virtualization I decided to give KVM/QEMU a go and make a virtual windows install inside Ubuntu.

I installed Windows 2000 Professional and can now run that from my KDE/Beryl desktop. The virtual OS has full network support so I can browse the web and whatnot from it.

To install the virtual OS is pretty much straight forward. Follow the instructions here, here and here.

Networking was what I had issues with, until I found this brilliant guide. Following that instead of the instructions in the above provided installation guides saves you alot of blood, sweat and tears.

You can also use Samba to create a directory on the host where the guest has full access. To do that you need to add -smb to the qemu commandline. You’ll need to have Samba up and running on the host and also make sure you have a smb user you can log on to the share with. Go here to get some pointers on how to set it up.

The command I use to launch my guest OS is:

qemu -cdrom /dev/cdrom -hda w2kpro.img -m 1024 -net nic,vlan=0 -net user,script=/etc/qemu-ifup -smb /home/fileshare

Click on the image below to see the full size screenshot:

beryl, beryl screenshot, feisty, kvm, qemu, ubuntu, virtualization
//diffuze

Filed under: Applications, Linux, Screenshots