Run Windows XP in a window - using VirtualBox

[johnrw]

For those of you looking to chuck your Windows XP, you may like what method I have chosen for those times you absolutely must have it available. I looked around at a few VM efforts. I considered buying Win4Lin, until I read the readme which states it cannot work with usb devices in the guest OS... unless they are already working in the host... or something like that. Bottom line... no usb except maybe a mouse or keyboard. I looked at the vm in Knoppix, QEMU and KQEMU... it looked complicated enough to put on a back burner for me.

I had already tried winetools... but that had a drawback somewhere I can't remember at the moment.
Next up, VirtualBox by Innotek, which
Sun Microsystems just bought. That made me curious enough to try it out, if I could install it on Knoppix.

Well we all know that vmWare can probably do this. But at $189 who needs windows THAT badly!
Recently I had to run a Windows program on my Knoppix box. This program needed to access a low speed USB device, in particular... an energy monitor that monitors my house's electrical usage. That would be the TED 1001, available at TED. It has only a windows NT,XP program that you can use to monitor it with called Footprints. It required .Net version 2.0 and has a USB to Serial port driver that you have to install as well, called CDM 2.02.04.exe. It's on the net as well.

I am going to try and list the steps I did to get that working, on Knoppix 5.1.1, installed to a 5GB partition that has the Knoppix DVD iso file on it. I have my persistent home (knoppix.img) file on a separate XP ntfs partition which is about 5GB also.
I am running on a older AMD 32 bit board, so I can't help you on what will happen with the 64 bit version running on a 32 bit i386 Knoppix. I am just trying to find a cheap pc to record the data this monitor sends out every second or so. I wonder if getting the 32 bit i386 deb will work well on Knoppix 5.1.1 which is basically i386 as well. I'll do that soon enough and add to this thread later what my results were. Maybe someone else has already done this.

So let me get started telling you what I did. Download this deb, for Knoppix 5.1.1 users. If you run a different Knoppix version... you'll have to do some checking for which version to use. They have debs for Etch and Sarge.

First I did some commandline checking with apt-get -s install ~/Desktop/virtualbox_1.5.6-28266_Debian_etch_i386.deb to see if it would complain. Then after getting no complaints, I then installed it without the -s.

It gave me some error about a kernel module was not available for it... with a line saying I should execute "sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup" in a console. I think dpkg was even offering to do this for me, but I just opened another console and did it there and when it finished I went back and continued.

On the dvd version this built without any errors. The CD version may be missing kernel headers. When you are finished, you can type "lsmod | grep vbox" without quotes in a console and you should see a module loaded, such as vboxdrv 54912 0. As for any additional libraries VirtualBox requires... on the DVD version everything is there already.

Next, since there are no shiny new icons on the Desktop, I had to roll my own. Right clicking on the Desktop, and picking... Create New->Link to Application. In the General tab... you can fill in a more descriptive name than "Link to Application" is. I chose VirtualBox. Then click the Application tab and in the third text field, labeled "Command" enter /usr/bin/VirtualBox. You are done unless you want to change your icon... by clicking on the blue gear. I wound up grabbing the one off the website.
that I can touch up if the non transparent background really winds up bugging me.
Edit: Mar 09, 2008 I found a transparent version so here it is
[b]Edit: May 28, 2008 The image disappeared. I'll put it up on my server till I find out why.

Next, add the knoppix user to the vboxusers group, by editing the file /etc/group.
Mine now says: vboxusers:125:knoppix on the last line, as I just added the word knoppix to the end of what was put there by the installation. Then I had to reboot... maybe I could have just logged out but my Knoppix reboots quickly now that I have fixed this bug.

Next I opened a terminal... and I typed sudo VirtualBox. Sometimes a program finishes installing when run the first time... and that's best done as root. I dunno. Better safe than sorry.,

Now for the fun part... Creating the virtual Windows XP. You'll want to have some hard disk space for this... although for my needs I don't plan on using the expanding drive feature of VirtualBox. I used the fixed option. There are only 2 things I need to mention before we stick in a Windows Installer cd. Unless you have 2 cdrom drives in the same pc, you may have a hard time using one for Knoppix, and one for the Windows installer. That's another good reason to just go ahead and create some permanent partitions for Knoppix, and a separate one for your persistent home sized accordingly.
Some offtopic stuff follows.

Using Gilles' van Ruymbeke's wonderful minirt_511a.gz, I can boot Knoppix from anywhere. Ntfs drives included. I have even used his ntfs_rw cheatcode which allows you to have an iso image of Knoppix on your XP drive... and be able to write to that same drive when you are in Knoppix. Ok, so if you want to know about getting that minirt_511a.gz, and using it on your pc... I would suggest a www.knoppix.net+minirt_511a.gz&hl=en&safe=off&filt er=0]Google site search[/url] of these forums for minirt_511a.gz, as the one here seems to return nothing for some strange reason.

I have prepared a script which will load the files you need to edit, into an editor... and using straight KDE dialogs and dcop, allow you to see what those changes are... and extract a boot directory to what is supposed to be your C: drive. If you feel adventurous, you can get both files Here is knoppix-pmi-setup.sh and Here is boot.tar.bz2 and place them in the same directory before running the pmi-setup script. After downloading the script, and reading it to make sure it might do what you want... you'll need to open a terminal and cd to the directory you saved the files to and make the script an executable with a, "chmod +x knoppix-pmi-setup.sh" command. Even though it will give you gui stuff to use, I'd still recommend running it from the console. Some error messages are "normal" non critical kde errors... but it does the job, and was fun for me to explore dcop with.

Ok, in the screenshots below, you should notice I am giving direct control of the Cd Rom drive to windows. It worked flawlessly for my XP install set that way. And that I use /dev/hdc because it's the master drive on the second IDE controller.

The other thing... I have turned off usb 2.0... because as I was learning this myself, I had problems enabling high speed usb.
EDIT: Mar 06, 2008 OK...duh! I decided to plug in a High Speed USB device... and after I enabled it in the VirtualBox Devices menu, it worked great in Windows XP as well. I wasn't sure the TED device was a USB 1.x device before... but now I am. So the short of it is to go ahead and turn on EHCI if you have a High speed device plugged in already

One more tip... find your real mac address out by typing "ifconfig" in a console. Then use the same address for the network card in Network. You will run into problems activating windows if your vm has a different mac address than the one that gets sent to M$ from Knoppix. Layers and layers...

You should now be ready to insert your XP installation disk, and click the VirtualBox's Start button.









And now we are installing XP into a .vdi file... one you can backup to an external drive.
How long has it been since I could do that!!!!!
(Yeah, I have Ghost... but that is almost as inconvenient as installing XP.)





Running TED Footprints energy monitor program.






Now once you are up and running in your Guest OS, there is one last step to make to enable a usb device. In VirtualBox's main menu, of an already running XP or whatever OS you choose to load, go to the Devices menu... and pick USB. You will get a popout menu of what VirtualBox says is available to enable inside the guest OS vm. Once I did that... then windows device discovery took over and installed the drivers for the device.

Since I cannot remember how I did it... I'll also mention there is a feature called "guest additions." At some point I was prompted to install them, and said sure, go ahead. They may be needed or not.
EDIT: Mar 8, 2008 Well as I get more familiar with VirtualBox, this content will reflect that. Guest Additions, you are not really finished until you also install them too. First you go to the Devices menu of VirtualBox, and select Install Guest Additions. Once you do that... there will be a new drive. Mine is VBOXADDITIONS_1.5.6_28241. Double clicking it should start it's installation. Once you restart... going to My Network Places, then Entire Network... should show you a new class "VirtualBox Shared Folders." Now following instructions for sharing your drives with your VirtualBox Guests should work as expected.
I would suggest to start out making a folder in your $home's Desktop... ie...

mkdir ~/Desktop/VboxHome

then creating a shared folder to that folder using the VirtualBox gui. This way your permissions will not be a factor. Once you have that working you can try elsewhere. When VirtualBox asks you for a Folder Path I would also recommend to use full pathnames.
For my earlier example

/home/knoppix/Desktop/VboxHome

instead of ~/Desktop/VboxHome

You may notice my cpu usage was around 65%... I believe that is from the usb device sending really small chunks of data. I could be wrong but when I plug that box in... the vm takes more cycles. I could care less. I don't plan on sticking an expensive pc on for just an electric monitor program to run. If it burns up, I'll find another lol.

Enjoy.

VirtualBox does have a help facility with alot of helpful information I see no point in covering here.

edits: jw
1. fixed a few smal typos, but I will be making updates to this.
2. Mar 06, 20008 correct my USB 2.0 dilema... to show it must have a USB 2.0 device plugged in for it to be detected as such.
3. Mar 08, 2008 Add some more info about Guest Additions.
4. Mar 10, 2008 Located a transparent icon, the white background bugged me.
5. May 28, 2008 Transparent Image has disappeared... I'll host an archive of it for this article.

[Harry Kuhman]

....Well we all know that vmWare can probably do this. But at $189 who needs.....

VMware player is free, does the job fine, and as far as I jnow has a lot less overhead (based on how large a % of the CPU the virtual application gets).

[johnrw]

http://www.vmware.com/products/player/ says.....

"Run virtual machines on your Windows or Linux PC with VMware Player 2.0. This free desktop virtualization software application makes it easy to operate any virtual machine created by VMware Workstation, VMware Server or VMware ESX Server, as well as Microsoft virtual machines and Symantec LiveState Recovery disks. You can also use Player to evaluate one of the many virtual appliances available from the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace"

So people need VMware workstation to make the XP "appliance"... which Innotek's VirtualBox allows you to do with just one product. A free for personal use product.

As for the high cpu rate... I've already explaned that was because of the TED monitor sending really small packets often enough to jam things up. I discovered that reading the lkml, and mr usb greg k-h explained it straight forward enough. Even on my XP laptop the device is always causing writing... ie no buffering. Maybe on the next TED version they will see reason enough to put a 4k chip on it to buffer with. But other people who have a similar needs, may have better hardware hooked up to usb than this is.

Ya know, I suspect QEMU and kQEMU are probably better and they come with Knoppix 5.1.1 but this was so dreadfully easy I wanted to share with the Windows XP crowd. Tonight, I blew away two old XP partitions so I can make a really nice Windows XP Window with this.

cheers

[Harry Kuhman]

...So people need VMware workstation to make the XP "appliance"...

Actually, they don't. I've made XP and Vista and even Wn98 virtual machines without the use of Workstation at all. The VMX file is just a text file that is very easily edited. But no need to even break out a text editor; there are websites and tools that will make the vmx file for you. One such website is easyvmx.com , which will make a vmx file to your specifications. But the best tool that I found so far is one that you don't have to keep going back to the Internet for each time that you want to make a few changes to the vm called VMX Builder. It lets you create and edit VMX files with a nice GUI based editor.

These are not the only ways to build a vmx file for free. You could simply use VMware's free VMserver, which makes vmx files, but it's overkill for most simple vmx files. And the simplest way of all might be just to take any virtual machine that you already have, boot it, tell the virtual machine to go into it's virtual BIOS so that you can boot from CD or DVD rather than hard disk, insert a bootable install CD into your drive and install something off of the bootable disk, completely formatting and overwriting your old virtual disk in the process! This is a bit crude, since you retain the old VM's settings such as memory and disk size, but it does work. I've install Debian from the net-install CD this way, just to prove that I could do it.

[johnrw]

#!/usr/bin/vmplayer

# Filename: My_Super_Easy_VM.vmx
# Generated 2008-03-03;09:36:31 by EasyVMX! Super Simple Edition
# http://www.easyvmx.com

# This is a Workstation 5 or 5.5 config file
# It can be used with Player
config.version = "8"
virtualHW.version = "4"

Well it's a long config file, most windows users could not cope with. This is a forum for people with a windows background.

Otoh, I noticed VMware player has a parallel port, which VirtualBox does not have.
I still have an HP Deskjet that uses lpt.

VirtualBox is just easier. If it works right. It worked for me.

cheers

[Harry Kuhman]

Well it's a long config file, most windows users could not cope with. This is a forum for people with a windows background.

I'm not clear on why you would want to say this. Even if you manually edit it, it's not that large or complex. Windows users have been dealing with far worse, at least any windows user who would likely use a virtual machine. Take for example the awful ini files in windows. But I pointed out free tools that give windows users a graphical user interface to create or edit the vmx file. One never has to look at the text contents of the file. The parallel port is just one of many advantages of using VMware. I have nothing against people having other options, and was glad to read the information that you presented about VirtualBox. But VMware is a very professional product and the availability of a free VMware player as well as free VMware server and free tools that create and edit vmx files should not be overlooked. To state that it costs nearly $200 to be able to create virtual machines with VMware is incorrect; I use VMware, freely and legally, and can create virtual machines just fine.

[drb]

A vote here for Virtualbox - I couldn't believe how easy it was to install and add a guest OS. No problems with USB (printers, scanners etc.) - the only issue I've had is the lack of firewire support.

drb

[johnrw]

I'm not clear on why you would want to say this.

Harry... I said it because it appeared you were trying to advise others that they should use VMware Player instead of VirtualBox, and I was pointing out it was alot harder than VirtualBox is.

My Super Easy VM web configurator:
1. Returned me a zip file... with the same basname.
2. It had five files in it.
My_Super_Easy_VM-s001.vmdk 327680 Mar 3 03:36
My_Super_Easy_VM-s002.vmdk 327680 Mar 3 03:36
My_Super_Easy_VM-s003.vmdk 131072 Mar 3 03:36
My_Super_Easy_VM.vmdk 427 Mar 3 03:36
My_Super_Easy_VM.vmx 3019 Mar 3 03:36

In the vmx file... for instance...
# These settings decides interaction between your
# computer and the virtual machine
isolation.tools.hgfs.disable = "FALSE"
isolation.tools.dnd.disable = "FALSE"
isolation.tools.copy.enable = "TRUE"
isolation.tools.paste.enabled = "TRUE"


What is hfgs.disable?

But since it returned me a VMware player for version 1, based on Workstation 5.x, I don't know if they are even compatible.

Harry, I should have thanked you for pointing that out, that I could use VMware to do this. It is the best in it's class.
Thanks for that. Otoh... I don't belong in the new to Linux forum, cause I'm not. I'll check into VMware Player but did I mention I wanted this thing to be up and running asap? VMware would have required me to be an experienced user to know what you knew. True, many windows users are familiar with VMware. Maybe in the long run... I'll get to know VMware for completeness sake... but VirtualBox makes getting a VM up and running such a snap, I feel I just had to let others know how cool it is.

cheers

[johnrw]

Harry,

Ya know? I installed VMware player. The installation asked me a ton of questions with defaults provided. I accepted them.
It killed my network. When I ran the My_Super_Easy_VM.vdx, I also got errors for:
parallel0 not found, and the same with the serial port.

I had to remove all of it's startup stuff in /etc/ and /etc/dhcpc/resolve.conf was changed to a non existant ip.
Not the kind of thing windows users can do. Unless they are familiar with VMware.

I saved the installation output in case you want to know I did wrong, cause I sure don't.

My final verdict is the same as the one I started this topic with.
VirtualBox is so much easier, and works great.

cheers

[Harry Kuhman]

.... I accepted them.
It killed my network. When I ran the My_Super_Easy_VM.vdx, I also got errors for:
parallel0 not found, and the same with the serial port....

That's strange. I've installed VMplayer many times and never had a problem with it. I did have some problems trying to install Sun Solaris to a virtual machine, but I expect thats a different issue, as my VMplayer installs can play all vmx's I've downloaded and the other ones that I built myself, even my Win98 and Vista VMX's.

I don't know that I've ever used the "super easy" mode in Easy VMX, think I always used the more middle of the road approach. But I don't use it at all any more, I just find the downloadable VMXbuilder application so much nicer.

Still, these should work for you. Unfortunately, you don't give many details on what the problems were or even supply the supposedly bad files. When I have such a problem, I don't just say "it doesn't work", I want to understand what is failing. For example, you should be able to inspect that vmx file you had the website create for you and either find what is wrong with it or concede that it's correct. Kind of like the guys who post here that Windows will not boot after trying a Knoppix CD. I see such posts two or three times each year, but have absolutely never seen anyone post any meaningful information about what they think Knoppix has done to their system. I don't know what I can do for you (and I suspect you don't really want your VMware issues resoved, you seem to just want to make a case for Virtualbox over VMware) unless you are willing to get a little more involved. I suggest downloading vmxbuilder and making a vmx file that way that gives access to the ports you want. Then look at both that vmx file and the one that you made with the easy vmx website and seeing what is different in the port section of the files. I would also suggest trying the more stanndard easy vmx option, not the vmx for dummies option, but I don't really know if that's an issue.

You seemed to want to put words in my mouth when you posted "it appeared you were trying to advise others that they should use VMware Player instead of VirtualBox". But I only made my post after you had done an extensive post highly pushing one virtualization solution, Virtualbox, complete with extensive graphics, and not only ignoring many other solutions but also making the false claim that it would cost $189 to do the same thing with VMware. I only wanted to correct that claim, particularly since I enjoy the products that VMware has made available to us for free.

Quite frankly, when I first saw your Virtualbox post, it looked like a spam message posted by a shill for SUN. If it had been posted by a new member to these forums rather than someone who has been active here for 18 months and with nearly 50 good posts on many different topics, it would have likely been deleted. But knowing you as a helpful member here, you clearly went to a lot of trouble to write up such a detailed piece on this virtualization tool, one that I assume you found helpful and wanted to share with others. I don't know why you seem to have less than positive feelings about my correction of the VMware cost issue or my sharing of my experiences with VMware and third party tools for it.

I'll also point out that in conflict to your $189 claim to create vmx files for VMware, VMware is actually "more free" than Sun's Virtualbox. VirtualBox is free for personal use, but the full version has more restrictions on it than the free VMplayer for commercial use. If one is looking for true free open code software, neither Virtualbox nor VMware fit that requirement.

As to your statement "it appeared you were trying to advise others that they should use VMware Player instead of VirtualBox", I just let it slide when you posted that yesterday, I didn't want to get into a debate. But your post today with limited information and bad results that I've never duplicated seems to demand a response (you didn't actually install both VMplayer and Virtualbox on the same instance of an OS, did you?). I wasn't trying to advise others to install either, just trying to correct the misinformation. But after giving it consideration based on your post, yes, I'll advise others to install VMPlayer rather than Virtualbox. VMware is very clearly the current leader in this technology, and has many features that Vrtualbox lacks (some of which you have acknowledged). I don't stop there though. If users have an interest in this technology, I encourage them to look a other options, including KVM, XEN and Virtualbox as well as many others. I'll even point them to this comparison of different solutions to get started. I advise against trying to install more than one of these applications on any single Windows or Linux install however; while the install of a virtual machine may look like a very simple dialog, it has to do a number of complex things to the host OS to get everything right, and it's not unlikely that multiple virtualization products would have some conflicts if more than one were installed on an OS at the same time.