Guess what I am doing?

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After I completely torched my previous Windows install with a virus infected software, I decided to try another way and install Windows in a virtual computer on Ubuntu!

Here is what I did, although some more differenter instructions can be found here:

Go to the famous "Add/Remove..." and install "Qemulator". I don't know how well suited this will be for my purposes, but this is a test anyway, so no big deal.

Now we need a fake hard drive. Now, go to the beautiful terminal (I made a keyboard shortcut: ctrl+alt+t) and travel to somewhere convenient and make a drive with Qemu:
qemu-img create windows.img 10000M

qemu-image: The Qemu program which makes the fake drive
create: I wonder if there is a detroy function?
windows.img: This is the file, which is a hard drive image
10000M: This is 10 Gigs, I am going to install a large program on here, so...

Now lets boot the fake machine up!
qemu -boot d -cdrom /dev/scd0 -hda windows.img

qemu: The program virtualizing an entire computer!
-boot d: This tells qemu what drive to pretend to boot from, in this case the cd
-cdrom /dev/scd0: The cdrom is this device, make sure it's your actual cd*
-hda windows.img: This is the earlier created hard drive image

Now Qemu will boot up to whatever cd you previously mounted on your computer. What? You didn't mount the disk yet? Well, do that, type the above command, and come back here.

Okay, now Qemu should boot up into whatever the cd was, in my case it was the Windows XP installation guide. The setup was all plain-text, fine with me, and took maybe 8 minutes. Then Windows wants to restart. It will restart Qemu, but exit the program first.

What you need to do is start Qemu back up, this time with only slightly different commands:
qemu -boot c -cdrom /dev/scd0 -hda windows.img

These are the same as last time, except for this one:
-boot c: This tells Qemu to boot to what Windows wants to call the C:/ drive, which is your "windows.img" fake hard drive file.

Now Windows should boot into it's familiar black screen with that awesome graphic window-esque thing, and then it will want to install all the drivers, files, etc., just like a normal Windows installation.

It seems that, to get the internets to work inside Qemu, you have to tell it to pass network capabilities through. It virtualizes everything else, network and usb support as well. To do that, add -net nic to the end of the command, so it looks like:
qemu -boot c -cdrom /dev/scd0 -hda windows.img -net nic

Other instructions said use -net user, I don't know the difference very well, but -net nic was the only one that worked for me.

Once you are comfortable with your Qemu configurations, you probably want to make a shortcut of some kind so you don't have to remember this command all the time. I don't have any cool tricks up my sleeve on this one, just copy and paste the command into a hand-made shortcut.

One more thing: I installed Qemu by using the "Add/Remove..." in Ubuntu, but I found the GUI was not useful, and had enough interface glitches that running through the command line is much easier. If I can figure out the command line way to install I will let you know, it's probably really simple.


*To double check your cd drive, go to the terminal (after you put in your cd and can open it's folders) and type:
df
This will list all the mounted things, drives and memory are both "mounted" in Linux, look for one that says "/dev/scd0" or perhaps "/dev/cdrom", but on the right it will have the title of the cd, like "/media/X1APFPP_EN" or something similarly unintelligible.