QEMU/Guests/Windows XP

< Windows 2000 | Windows Longhorn >



Windows XP is an operating system created by Microsoft, released on August 24, 2001. Support ended in April 8, 2014 but this varies based on the version your using. Windows XP has several different editions (such as Home Edition, Tablet PC edition, Media Center edition, Embedded, etc). This article covers every variant of Windows XP including POSReady 2009 which is supported until 2019.

Running on CollabVM
Windows XP works great as a VM for CollabVM. A few programs do not work on it but thanks to its still large popularity this usually isn't a big problem. VM 2 on the official CollabVM website runs Windows XP with Service Pack 3 installed. Both Home and Professional are known to work perfectly fine in QEMU and CollabVM.

Recommended version: Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 3

Pre-installation
Make a qcow2 image (or a raw image if you want) by typing qemu-img create -f qcow2 winxp.img 10G

10G can be replaced with however big you want the hard drive to be (with G standing for Gigabytes). Windows XP is not really that big of an OS and it can even be installed on 2 GB of space if you turn hibernation off, but 5 GB is recommended as a minimum if you want to be able to install several programs.

When that's done, run the following command:

qemu-system-i386 -hda winxp.img -cdrom winxp_iso_name.iso -boot d -enable-kvm -cpu host -m 512 -vga cirrus -net nic,model=rtl8139 -net user -usbdevice tablet -localtime

Or if running without root or virtualization: qemu-system-i386 -hda winxp.img -cdrom winxp_iso_name.iso -boot d -cpu qemu64 -m 512 -vga cirrus -net nic,model=rtl8139 -net user -usbdevice tablet -localtime

We run with 512 MB of RAM, but this can be lowered to 256 MB if your server is low on resources. It also runs on as low as 64 MB of RAM but this is unrecommended. If you cannot allocate more than 128 MB of RAM, you may want to run Windows 2000 instead, which runs better on 128 MB.

After installation
qemu-system-i386 -hda winxp.img -boot c -enable-kvm -cpu host -m 512 -vga cirrus -net nic,model=rtl8139 -net user -usbdevice tablet -localtime

Or if running without root or virtualization: qemu-system-i386 -hda winxp.img -boot c -cpu qemu64 -m 512 -vga cirrus -net nic,model=rtl8139 -net user -usbdevice tablet -localtime

< Windows 2000 | Windows Longhorn >