Who's a Linux virtualization maven?

[HillWilliam]

I just upgraded to Fedora Core 13 (and liking what I see a lot). I haven't used virtualization in a long while not having had an adequate machine for the task. My pore-ole desktop finally said "no more", so this week I went and got a nice new box and moved my stuff into it. Now that I have room and decent processing power, I need to put up an XP virtual machine so I can telecommute this winter when (not if) I get snowed or iced in.

This used to be an easy thing to do. Fling in VMWare (or something like), add a virtual machine definition, then fling an OS in that. Work fine, las' longtime.

Used to be. There seems to be precious little good documentation on setting up a virtual XP guest. Yeah, I know, I wouldn't touch Windows at all except there is one development studio I use at work for which there isn't a Linux version. So there, I work and get paid when winter hits or I don't. The things ya have to do...

So I set the guest up after several tries. It took a great deal of scouring the 'toobs to find out that Windows wants a qcows2 type virtual disk (whatever that may be, I don't really care; I just want the suckah to work). No matter what I do, I can get XP as far as the first time it wants to download the first Windows Update. G'd help you then. The defining symptom for my post is that when you reboot the VM, it always hangs up at starting the BIOS.

No matter how you have the boot preferences set, it will only -- only -- boot from CD. Trying to recover the system doesn't help. I must have gone at reinstallation fortyleven different ways. (It's not as if I'm a stranger to installing either Linux or Windows.)

Here's what I've got:

1) I'm running with SELinux disabled.
2) The XP virtual machine has a 100G qcows2 virtual drive.
3) It has 1G of memory and access to one processor.
4) After multiple attempts at getting XP installed, I managed to get it through installing the first Windows Update component after which it wanted a reboot. It never came back. Again.
5) I tried booting from the CD again and running fixmbr. That didn't do the trick. The virtual machine startup hangs at "Starting SeaBIOS" with no further message.
6) No matter how I have the boot device preferences set, it will not boot at all without a CD in /dev/sr0. Period. Yes, I pressed "Apply" after designating my changes.
7) I've run setup several times with varying degrees of progress, but never a complete success (where I could shut down and reboot at will).
8) I tried the alternate instructions here: http://linuxgazette.net/178/silva.html which didn't seem to make any difference. The VM hung up at the same place. I undid the changes and put the config back to stock.

I'm hoping I've missed some nuance. Virtualization has progressed light-years beyond the old VMWare I haven't used in years (which was pretty good in its day). There are people who have claimed that it works on Core 13 and there are some posts that claim there are bugs and it won't work. None seem to offer any HOWTOs or "I ran into this symptom and here's how I got it fixed".

On DU there's always somebody who knows something about any subject on earth. FedoraForum seems to be rather silent on the subject, so I'm coming back home to see what turns up here. Any clues would be gratefully received.

[RoyGBiv]

1. Try Virtualbox

http://www.virtualbox.org/

http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads

It has step by step guides for setting up Windows guests.

You can sometimes have issues with hardware, specifically network or sound usually. There are options that let you play around with this, and I've never not managed to get a Windows guest to work on some level. I had the most problems with Windows 7, but that was when it had first been released.

[HillWilliam]

2. Totally rocks

All I had to do was skim the RTFM. It popped right in and I've got my nice little XP VM. It boots. It updates. It reboots. Igor!! It lives!!

Hats off. I'm very grateful. Virtualbox is pretty slick and easy.

[RoyGBiv]

5. Awesome ...

I love it when a plan comes together. :)

[HillWilliam]

6. I got the video happy after all

It's surprising how easy this VM manager is; even more flexible than VMWare was in its day.

I don't have shares working right, but that's not a huge deal, just a tiny bit inconvenient. I'll keep reading up. There won't be much flowing back and forth. I have some DVD images floating on disk (the Linux side) it would be nice to install work-things like Visual Studio and Cache from. Worse comes to the worst, FileZilla works like a charm and the virtual networking is FAST.

So far, I see nothing to dislike. It WORKS. Nicely. Politely.

Thanks for the tip. I have a 110-mile round trip commute to work and back. During the winter it can go from un-fun to impossible. Virtualbox is the perfect cheap-and-cheery solution.

[RoyGBiv]

7. Shares are my lingering nit ...

When I run a Linux guest, the shares are fine. With a Windows guest, they are incredibly slow to connect. Data transfer is reasonable, but the connecting is delayed.

If it were something I did use very much, I'd have to figure out what's going on.

[HillWilliam]

8. I noticed that

but as little as I need shares (usually just for installing the two or three IDE's I need for work) it's not a big deal. The way this thing rocks along, the tediously slow connection for shares is something I can easily put up with. Tonight I'm finishing up getting VS2008 in place and I'll put the little appurtenances I'll need to add to it (Symbol Mobility SDK, OpenNet SDK, blahblah) through the week. Miraculously, it's behaving. It will be interesting to see what happens when I hook up a Pocket PC and try to do ActiveStink :-P InterSystems Cache should run fine. It happily runs on anything but for some reason they've never moved their IDE away from Windoze-only.

I'm impressed and that ain't easy t'do.

[struggle4progress]

3. I'll also suggest trying VirtualBox. I use it for scoping out linux distros on a mac, but

it's available for a number of hosts. And it supposedly supports XP as a guest. Check to see if you can install guest additions for XP as guest: it might make life easier. Under the best circumstances, you can get seemless integration for your pointer between guest and host, and you can set up sharing permissions so that the guest OS can access some files in the host system

[HillWilliam]

4. This is a lot more like I remember things running

I'm just now dl'ing the windoze updates and will worry with some of the fine tuning when that's done. It's complaining about the video settings being 16-bit but everything I see (so far) is turned on wide-open. Doesn't seem like a big thing to find and fix. It's just a Really Good Thing™ to have a VM handy for those very few times I need it. Everything I need is on a mountable partition on my partner's linux box. Whatever I need to grab and install, I can FileZilla from there as a one-shot. I don't need to set up elaborate networking or file sharing.

This is very cool. Even the sound works... temptation to reinstall iTunes, badbadbad.