Title says it all. I need to setup an internet connection in Windows 98 which is running inside QEMU

qemu command
How do I do it?

Win98 First Edition or Win98 SE?

Win98 SE

Personally, I'd keep any version of Windows from before 2015 as far away from the internet as possible...

What exactly are you trying to achieve? Whatever it is, I'm sure there must be a better way!

Since 22-years-old Windows skills are unlikely to be too developed, or too fresh, in this Linux community, perhaps we should turn the question around. When you use this command line, what is it that doesn't work?

One problem might be the network device. I have no idea what devices are supported by Win98, though RTL8139 is reasonably old, it seems.

I found this: https://resources.infosecinstitute.c...st-networking/. However, I doubt that you can use virtio on Windows 98. Still worth a try, I guess.

I have some software I need keep XP for - a couple of years ago I tried to move it to both KVM and Hyper-V. Various bits and pieces couldn't be made to work - e.g. the headphone mike. I kept the physical machine in the end - hardly ever gets turned on.
It has no access to the network, and I had no plans for it as a guest either, so I can't help with the initial query.

Looks like I will not be able to use the internet. It's just for fun. I was bored so felt like sending an email in Win98

Qemu has been able to run Windows 98 since day one.

It's how you set up nic in qemu that's the problem.

https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=774745

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I finally got it set up....

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The most likely reason that anyone would want to do this is that Virtualbox doesn't work properly with Win98 anymore, and qemu appears to have no 'just works' solution to getting info in and out of a win98 vm (e.g. -mnt <hostfilepath> <guestfilepath>), so that the ignorant hopeful user flails around amongst mostly no-longer functional recipes which involve networking (samba, etc) in some way or other.

1. Win98 works just fine in VirtualBox. It's not officially supported, but it does work quite well... Um, that is to say, that Win98 works as well under VBox as Win98 is capable of "working" (i.e. not very).

2. Windows 98 only supports old SAMBA protocols. You need to configure your SAMBA server to allow the use of those protocols. They've been disabled by default for the past few years, because they're not very secure.

3. What info could you possibly have in a Win98 VM that you absolutely must get out?

1. In my experience, it doesn't (and there are innumerable internet discussions indicating that my experience is not unique).

2. Like you say, connecting Win98 to networking is surely an unsafe practice

3. Old business records and family tree information collected by relatives in the 90s are two reasonably compelling motivations.

The easy solution for getting info into qemu-Win98 is to burn it to virtual .iso's and mount them (reasonably obvious), to get it out, shut down the machine, convert the .qcow2 file to .vdi (very fast), and browse that with 7zip and extract whatever you need (maybe less obvious). Floppy disk images might be another possibility, but that also seems to be a maze of abandonware that doesn't quite work anymore, so why bother?

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It certainly does. After reading your post the other day, I got curious and tried it yesterday. I'm here to tell you: It absolutely does work. Proof attached.

There were some "hoops" to jump through, but I was able to get it working fairly quickly in 1024x768 with True Colour enabled. Geez it was garbage.

What trouble have you had installing it? Virtual box's default settings for Win98 will get it working, but you'll have to tweak them if you want things like better resolution.

Once it's installed, you can put an FTP server on it and grab whatever you like. This is a whole lot easier than trying to set up networking or USB.

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I was also curious and also installed it as a VirtualBox VM. I have not tried changing video resolutions yet but yes it works ok. Anyone's experience would depend on how you use it.
I have installed DOS 6.22 as well as Red Hat 9 in VB just for fun and they worked as expected.

Playing games or browsing the internet using Internet Explorer would probably be futile. 98 has a ftp client installed by default so easy to copy files as well as using a virtual floppy or CD disk to import files to the VM. Although really slow you could print to an Epson 9 pin like printer using a serial port and pipe it to a file on your host.