Ubuntued

The main reason limiting individuals from moving permanently from Windows to Ubuntu is the lack of support for numerous software applications. Fortunately, this reality is changing because of the growing Ubuntu community contributing to the process through developing Open Source alternatives, and the expansion of the Linux market attracting the attention of proprietary application developers.

Although some applications run quite smoothly through the excellent Wine package, others cause much trouble and you just need to run Windows in order to get the job done. Thanks to virtualization and VMware Player, a completely free application, you can now run Windows XP directly within your Ubuntu system. Note that this process might take some time but is worth it (take a look below). Let’s get started!

1. Install, at once, all the prerequisite packages. Run in the shell:
   sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-`uname -r` gcc-3.4 g++-3.4 wine
2. Download VMware Player for Linux (make sure you get the .tar version) and install it as follows:
   tar xvzf VMware-player-2.0.2-59824.i386.tar.gz
cd vmware-player-distrib
export CC=/usr/bin/gcc-3.4
sudo ./vmware-install.pl
   The default choice for all prompts should be ok.
3. We will now create a file partition for Windows XP (Steps 3 to 5). To do so we’ll need to run Qemu, a process emulator, through Wine. Proceed as follows:
   Download Qemu for Windows and install it with Wine
4. Create a directory to store all our data in:
   mkdir ~/winxp
cd ~/winxp
5. Now, create the file partition; you can set the amount of diskpace allocated to Windows XP by changing 10G (that’s 10 Gigabytes) to whatever you need:
   wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Qemu/qemu-img.exe create -f vmdk WindowsXP.vmdk 10G Formating 'WindowsXP.vmdk', fmt=vmdk
6. Let’s now create an ISO image of Windows XP. Insert the installation CD and execute:
   umount /media/cdrom0
dd if=/dev/cdrom of=WindowsXP.iso
   This will create a file called WindowsXP.iso; be patient, it might take some time to complete (took me about 4 minutes).
7. Create the VMware player configuration file:
   gedit WindowsXp.vmx
   Fill in the following content and save the file. You can set the amount of RAM to be used by changing the memsize value.
   #!/usr/bin/vmware
config.version = "8"
virtualHW.version = "3"
ide0:0.present = "TRUE"
ide0:0.filename = "WindowsXP.vmdk"
memsize = "256"
MemAllowAutoScaleDown = "FALSE"
ide1:0.present = "TRUE"
ide1:0.fileName = "WindowsXP.iso"
ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-image"
ide1:0.autodetect = "TRUE"
floppy0.fileType = "file"
floppy0.fileName = ""
floppy0.startConnected = "True"
ethernet0.present = "TRUE"
usb.present = "TRUE"
sound.present = "TRUE"
sound.virtualDev = "es1371"
displayName = "Windows XP"
guestOS = "winxp"
nvram = "WindowsXP.nvram"
MemTrimRate = "-1"
ide0:0.redo = ""
ethernet0.addressType = "generated"
uuid.location = "56 4d cd 3f 59 5b 61 43-fd 73 ef 46 56 4c 23 7b"
uuid.bios = "56 4d cd 3f 59 5b 61 43-fd 73 ef 46 56 4c 23 7b"
ethernet0.generatedAddress = "00:0c:29:4c:23:7b"
ethernet0.generatedAddressOffset = "0"
tools.syncTime = "TRUE"
ide1:0.startConnected = "TRUE"
uuid.action = "create"
checkpoint.vmState = "WindowsXP.vmss"
tools.remindInstall = "TRUE"
8. Run WindowsXp.vmx through VMwarePlayer (double clicking on the file will do), and go through the Windows XP installation, this might take anything from 15 min to 1 h depending on your system specifications.
   

Some time later… after installation is completed, you’re done! You can now launch Windows Xp from Applications -> System Tools -> VMWare Player and the speed is almost similar to that of running it as a main operating system.

This tutorial is partly based on dryandplain’s HOWTO on Ubuntu Forums.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 6th, 2008 at 7:23 pm and is filed under hacks, packages. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.