Project OIL&WATER (Linux & Windows)

So this weekend I set out to try virtualization software on Linux. My hardware: AMD AthlonXP running at 1.5Ghz and 512MB RAM. This is not an ideal platform to run virtualization tools on. I figured I'd try it out anyways. The software choices: Ubuntu 7.04 and Qemu (open source processor emulator).

I used the Ubuntu Community Docs as a guide for how to install WindowsXP under Ubuntu 7.04. Installation and configuration of Qemu wasn't too bad. Everything seemed to install just fine. Except I was restricted to only using about 128MB of RAM. I initially tried to use 256MB (half of the 512MB)... but I received some errors and had to reduce the value to 128MB. 128MB worked fine.. except the install of Windows was painfully slow.

When all was complete and the virtual machine rebooted itself into Windows this is what I was looking at:


Then I tried to login in:




"A problem is preventing Windows from accurately checking the license of this computer" is the error I receive. After some more research.. there is a work around by installing SP2. This particular flavor of WinXP didn't have SP2 installed. I have another, more up-to-date, copy of WinXP. I'll just try that instead.

I've tried the reverse of running a virtual Linux machine on a Windows platform. The hardware I had for that project was more robust that this setup (AMD AhtlonX2 running at 2GHZ, with 2GB of RAM). The software was WinXP Pro, VMWare Player and a Debian VMWare Virtual Appliance. Ran beautifully and really opened up options for maximizing the use of hardware.