As I am sure this issue is addressed (hopefully in depth) on the internet somewhere, could someone point me in the direction of a Beginners Guide to running Windows XP under Ubuntu 7.10 using virtual PC software? At the moment I have a dual-booting machine, but will need to run some online conferencing software which only comes on Windows XP. Which means I will have to be online under Windows XP while I am running it - power up the firewall and update that anti-virus/spyware/malware package...!

Is Windows XP running under Linux in the virtual PC environment, vulnerable to viruses in the same way Windows running straight from the PC would be? And if you "catch" a virus in your virtual environment, can it affect your Linux files in any way? (Can a Windows virus affect files written in ext3?)

There seems plenty of instances on the internet describing how to run Ubuntu or Linux on a Windows machine using virtualization, but few describe (in simple terms) doing it the other way round.

Can anyone suggest a site that explains all this, from scratch?

You need (if you want good performance) to have a computer that has hardware support for virtualization (if you have, you should have an option in BIOS to enable/disable it). Then you need software that runs the virtual operating systems (and possibly creates the virtual disks, handles virtual networking, ...) - you can try KVM (based on Qemu) or VMware products (some of them are free of charge, others not) or something else. Usually after you have installed the software it's as easy as configuring a virtual harddisk and some other basic things (there are graphical and command-line utilies for this, depending on the product one or both can be available), inserting the installation media (like cd) into drive and booting the installer in your virtual machine (the software). I have so far only ran some GNU/Linux distributions using KVM, but I guess they're all more or less the same.

The virtual machine can be networked with your physical machine so that you can transfer files etc. between them; your virtual Windows can (as I don't see why it couldn't) get viruses and everything the real thing can, but they can't (Windows malware, that is) creep from there to your Linux, because they are made for Windows. Rootkits and such are then a whole other story -- if you network the virtual machine with your physical one, it's the same threat as networking your (physical) machine with any other machine.

I hope your Windows programs don't require too much horse power, because virtual machines are never as fast as the real machines -- and if your pc doesn't have hardware support for virtualization, you get even worse results (running something like a graphical desktop on such a machine can be pretty frustrating). In addition you can't, as far as I know, take full advantage of your graphics card's capabilities (even if it was a brand new $5000 monster it looks like something very basic in the virtual machine), so forget games and anything that requires GPU power.

See kvm and vmware websites for more information about them..

Hmm... so overall then, would you recommend just maintaining a dual-boot environment rather than taking up virtualization, given the choice....? Or perhaps trying the conferencing software out in Wine? (a whole different ballgame, I know)

I have managed to get XP running as a virtual machine under VMWare Server. Was actually very easy to setup, right from installing VMWare server and then XP. The only thing you need to think about when using a vmware virtual machine is what network setup you want it to have. You can either allow it to connect to the same network you linux machine is on (Bridged as its called) or you can connect it a 'virtual' network which (I think) basically means it's on another sub-network.

The only thing you might want to double check before you choose which virtual system you go with is whether the XP machine will have full access to all the hardware on your host linux box (if this is important). eg under vmware, you can't access PCI cards in you host server from a virtual machine. CD/DVD drives are ok but not PCI and I don't know about anything connected to usb on the host.

As for security, I wouldn't like to be held to account on this but I would think that if you run XP on a virtual network (/dev/vmnet) rather than direct on the same network as the linux box (bridged), it might be a bit more secure.

Thank you for your advice, b0uncer and curtisa. You've certainly given me something to think about.

I am running a Windows XP installation within Virtual Box on Ubuntu 7.10 at work. I need XP for Corel Draw, Dreamweaver and our ERP software, and they all perform quite on par within Virtual Box with how they do on XP when booted by itself (the computer is set up as dual boot, too - it's an AMD Athlon 3200+ processor with 1.5 GB of RAM; I'm giving 650 MB of that to the virtual machine). Setting up Virtual Box is easy, and it has pretty good documentation, too.

Windows in a virtual environment is just as easily infected as it is stand-alone. That means that if you need web access you still have to run antivirus software etc. on it, which of course adds to the load.

Robin

I think for the limited use I will give it, plus the fact I need to be on the web while using the conferencing software, I may as well stick with dual-booting. Thanks for the help.

Steve,

Don't give up on virtualization too quickly. I have created a configuration much as your original post described using VMWare (although I have also gotten it to work with Virtual Box after fighting through some network bridging and USB issues). My objective was to run Ubuntu as my main, full time operating system however, I had some hardware (an old flat bed scanner) and some programs (PGP Desktop, and old FoxPro for DOS! app I wrote to track expenses and never upgraded, Internet Download Manager etc.) for which I had not yet found Linux replacements.

My hardware consists of: Dell Dimension 4600 Pentium4 - 2.8 GHz, 2 GB RAM, several 80 GB SATA drives in removable trays which plug into a rack in the PC and a 320 GB SATA drive mounted permanently in the PC.

In installed Ubuntu 7.10 on an 80 GB drive partitioned as follows:
/ 8 GB
/home 20 GB
swap 2 GB
/data (all the rest)

I downloaded a 30 day trial of VMWare workstation and created a basic XP Pro virtual machine on the /data file system. I copied it to the 320 GB drive for backup. I now run the virtual machine with VMWare Player which is free. I will probably purchase a copy of VMWare Workstation one of these days - I have an old educational license however it is beyond its upgrade window.

As to security... I run virus, malware and firewall protection on the XP virtual machine as it has access to the internet. If it gets infected it is no big deal. I can simply delete the files representing the virtual machine from the Linux file system and copy a previous backup from the 320 GB drive or from a DVD archived copy.

I have a subdirectory on the /data file system shared with SAMBA which allows the XP VM to access it. I can also access the shared subdirectory from other Windows and Linux PCs on my network for the purposes of conveying data to and from the XP VM. Of course the XP VM can share folders which may be accessed from other Windows PCs and it can access Linux file systems with tools such as WinSCP.

USB and CD/DVD drive sharing take a little getting used to. Sort of who gets there first. With the VM having focus it can generally snag the hardware. I have not had any destructive conflicts between the host and VM so far.

I have also created VMs for Windows Vista (which will not directly install on the PC - does not like the Intel on-board video I think) and a Ubuntu based LAMP server (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). A VM created on Linux will run on VMWare Player on another OS. So, when I plug in my XP OS disk I can run the LAMP server with the Windows Player and have done some PHP/MySQL development without having to install the server programs on the Windows PC (a definite security risk) or having a second PC running as a test server). Rather cool I think!

All that said... I am still running XP directly from a hard drive most of the time :-(( Just habit I guess. Actually I am waiting till I finally purchase a new PC. Something which will support more than 4 GB of RAM and has at least a single quad core processor. This should allow for quite excellent performance with the native OS and a couple of VMs running.

Regards,

Ken

Thanks for the detailed info, and I take in all you say but until I have more Linux experience I think I will stick to using my dual-boot XP. Plus, I have just installed Wine and am playing with that.

Choices, choices...!

My experience with virtualization is limited, but I've found that virtual box is simple to set up, and performs well even with a slower host machine. I have WinXP Pro installed inside VirtualBox on Ubuntu 8.04. The laptop only has a pentium 4 with 512MB of RAM, but I can play StarCraft and Age of Empires II in my 192MB RAM virtual windows box flawlessly. Something that Wine cannot do on the same machine. Starcraft running through Wine is molasses slow and pretty much unplayable, and AOE locks up and dies.
My suggestion is to do like I did. Get VirtualBox, Sun has prebuilt packages for virtually (pun intended) every current distro. No compiling and hunting for obscure libraries. Install it with your package manager, and dive in. The help files built in are actually very helpful and well organized covering every function.

Since I've found VirtualBox I've pretty much stopped messing with Wine since I've never been able to get much of anything to run well in it except for MS Calculator and MS Notepad.

Thank you, I'll bear it in mind.

For others that are researching this I'll put my vote in for VirtualBox.

I used VMWare originally but a kernel upgrade broke it and I couldn't get it back. Switched to VirtualBox ("vbox"); which I use for running accounting software (one virtual machine), web browser testing (other) and testing other Linux distros. You can now have a seamless vbox wherein, eg for WindowsXP, you can have a second application bar next to your Ubuntu one so windows from the virtualised OS are running side-by-side with the native OS. Also vbox was easier to set up for shared files for me.

What I would say is look out for kernel upgrades. If the virtualbox package isn't out for the new kernel (it can take some time) then if you upgrade you'll break virtualbox. I'm sitting at an upgrade behind on the kernel - but am still using Ubuntu 8.10alpha6 (with KDE4.1).