When you use your computer as often as I do, you grow attached. Which is why I treat mine to the best. A comfy padded bag to carry it, quality products to clean it, fresh batteries to keep it energized, and of course, Linux.
But once in a while we all have to make sacrifices. I’m doing interoperability testing, and have no choice but to run XP. The challange: convincing my pampered and spoiled PC to play along and boot Windows XP.
Wanting the best, I decided to go with Parallels. I set it up for the wife on her Mac. A pleasure. In fact, the hardest part of getting Parallels to work on the Mac was paying for the license. No seriously, they need to do something about their order process. Still, it’s a blast to use. Sadly, it won’t install on Fedora 6.
Sigh.
Asking around, I found out a little gem called QEMU. Like most open source products, you manage it using command line tools and whatever little documentation you can find. Not a big deal, and a couple of hours later I have Windows running in a window under Linux.
I used it for about a week until QEMU worn out its welcome. For starters, it’s slow. Sometimes painfully so. Couple of hours to install XP should give you an indication of things to come. Another sign: even when idling, it eats up 99% CPU and drains the batteries flat. And it can only run on one of the Duos.
The SMB share worked fine for a while, then one day, decided to stop. Opening an SMB folder would freeze it up. Many a restarts later, I still couldn’t get it to work. Then there was the issue of losing the network routing each time I went offline. Every time I hibernate, I had to reboot Windows. Just like using the real thing.
So I gave up and started looking for a better answer.
Googling some more landed me with Xen. Xen is actually a separate kernel which VMs Linux itself. Booting into Xen felt a bit odd, with progress indicators all spinning at warp 9, and a dozen new network devices. I played with it for a while, couldn’t get the QEMU image to boot, and switched back to ye good ole kernel, only to discover that Xen dances to its own beat. My system clock was two hours off.
In all fairness, Xen is more for virtualizing servers, not exactly what I was looking for.
Next, I tried VMPlayer from VMWare. Officially, not supported on Fedora, unofficially, installs after running the vmware-any-to-any patch. Theory states that it can run the same XP image created by QEMU, but a few minutes of fiddling around with configuration files, and all I got was this lousy blue screen of death.
Well, I didn’t expect much from an unofficial patch.
By chance, I’m cleaning up some old bookmarks, and bump into an announcement trumping VMServer. Same VMWare, different product. And yes, I do feel stupid for missing it before. Since VMWare doesn’t officially support Fedora hosts, I set my aims on their free to use product, not realizing there’s two of them.
Problem #1. The RPM doesn’t work, but somewhere I read that the TAR does. Problem #2, the vmware-any-to-any patch does little good, it installs but the server refuses to start. I Google for a patch that requires untarring, editing and re-tarring one of the modules. Half an hour later I get it to run, image created, XP installing.
It doesn’t feel like QEMU at all. It’s fast. Feels as fast as running XP native, but without the social stigma. Tweak the settings and it’s taking advantage of both Cores, yet wastes no CPU idling. The network works, and doesn’t particularly mind that I go offline several times a day.
So. Much. Better.
SMB sharing works. It’s Windows slow, but it works. And you absolutely must install the VMWare tools on the guest OS. With this little helper, it grabs focus when I move the mouse over the window, releases it when I move the mouse away. Much more productive than Ctrl-Alting in and out. It can also shrink down the image size, useful as it turns out I pre-allocated twice the disk space I needed for my XP setup.
What did I learn?
.. Performance matters, you won’t enjoy using a slow virtual machine for any length of time.
.. A checkbox feature and a working feature are not the same.
.. The open source alternatives are not that bad for small stints, just not good enough for the long runs.
.. “Unsupported” depends on your ability to Google a patch.
.. The mouse focus grab/release feature is more important than I imagined.
.. If I had to do it over again, I would start here.
Next stop: booting OS/X.