Has anyone installed the Windows 8 Consumer Preview in a KVM virtual machine running on a Linux host?

Microsoft very conveniently provides ISO files, which would seem to lend themselves handily to just such installation.

Their FAQ seems to suggest you don't need a license or to otherwise pay for them--which makes me very skeptical.

So will it work? Has anyone done it? Was it a pain?
What graphic output do you use (SDL, VNC, rdesktop, spice)?

planning to try an install this week actually, will update here how it went

I tried on centos 6 with - disk bus IDE and VGA adapter all was fine, but i can't change screen resolution from standard 1024x768... Can somebody help me?

got it working using virtio drivers and qxl/spice, but the current qxl drivers refuse to be installed claiming the OS is unknown. In any case, even like this, with qxl, graphics are not bad

My 1st attempt this week -

- Downloaded/burned Win8 ISO to DVD (long download time for 3.3Gb)
- Spun up a KVM instance (default settings)
- Access to Win8 ISO DVD was normal (began the installation scripts)
- After the 'Install Write Files/Custom Option' menu a splash screen appeared
(I cannot recreate this from memory)
- Paraphrase - 'remove installation media and reboot'

System hangs on reboot - 'No bootable media found' (some text about a Floppy drive)
If I reload the Win8 ISO media and reboot, the script starts over from the beginning.

Help requested.
jugknot - Denver

It runs in Virtualbox and I guess VMplayer is fixed in VMplayer 5.

I can't say there is much of a reason to have it a all over windows 7.

There have been a few ways to get an ISO and the terms are different for each user depending on how they acquire it. It is not a full install and will not work after so many days, again depending on how you obtained it.

You don't need to waste a DVD.
I accessed the iso directly something like this:

Oh I agree.
In fact, I can't say there's much reason to use any version of Windows.

I've had it running for a few weeks in VirtualBox under Sid.
Hateful Metro interface but other than that it's just another MS OS.
May just be me but it seems to be a little lighter as a VM than Ubuntu.

Fixed the KVM install of Win8 with 2 tweaks -

- needed a 12Gb partition!
- used the 'Custom Install' option

That's it.

Under VM Player current issue -

'Windows cannot find SW License Type'
I am not seeing the screen for SW License Acceptance (y/n).

Observations -
- Different VM platforms, different install dialogues?
- Metro Interface is a 'tip of the hat' to Apple
- All the Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter hooks in this OS are interesting (not too useful)
Is this the 1st 'Cloud Cuckoo-Land OS'
- 1st impression - I'd stick with Win7 over this release.

- Appreciate the KVM recommendations -
qemu-kvm -boot d -hda ~/kvm/Windows8.qemu \
-cdrom ~/iso/Windows8-ReleasePreview-64bit-English.iso' -vnc :8 \
-m 2048M -name Windows8 -net nic,name=coreo \
-net tap,script=no,downscript=no,ifname=tap8 -usbdevice tablet &

Will explore the features over the Trial Use period before passing judgement.
Do we expect that Windows Server 2012 can be demo-ed under KVM?

jugknot - Denver

According to this page, it needs 16 or 20 GB. Ridiculous, when you consider that a full install of Slackware takes 6.5 GB.

1 members found this post helpful.

Well but you know that Slackware not as good as Windows.
A great product needs greater spaces too.

Anyway I installed it on VMware player and I didn't experienced any mind blowing thing.
Similar to the previous ones but got the metro crap.
2GB RAM with 4 cores on the Vmachine and the system was struggling with everything. (Host is i7quad/8GB)