Episode: 618
Title: HPR0618: Installing Windows XP in VirtualBox
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0618/hpr0618.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 23:57:07

---

.
.
Hello, welcome to a public radio. My name is Arfab. Today I'm going to talk to you about installing Windows XP in a virtual machine using virtual box.
I'll start off just by explaining why exactly someone might choose to do this.
I'm a Linux user, I've been using Linux for probably about six or seven years.
And what I have found is that there is basically just one piece of software that I cannot do without for the sake of getting my day's work done.
I work as a professional musician and also largely as a teacher both in the classroom and teaching individuals.
And I found the piece of software called Sabelius, which is a piece of music composition software, is completely invaluable to me as a tool for my work.
And so as this tool only runs on MacOS X or Windows, I therefore have to have access to one of those operating systems.
And I would rather run Windows XP in a virtual machine and have that virtual machine exclusively for that piece of software than have a dual boot computer, which would probably end up wasting a lot more of my hard drive space than using this method.
Now I haven't gotten the experience with using other virtualization techniques or environments, I haven't used VMware, I've not really looked into Zen.
I did originally play around with QMU a bit, but my processor is actually only a dual core Pentium, so it doesn't support KPM.
And I'm not going to get sort of near native speeds using QMU in the same way that I would using virtual box.
And so that's pretty much how I've ended up doing things the way that I do.
And so let's just play straight into it and see how well I can describe my methods to you.
Now I'm not going to talk to you about how to install virtual box on your computer or not in too much depth anyway.
I'll just only let you know that I chose to go to virtualbox.org, click on download, and actually find their pre-compiled binary.
That's because a lot of distributions in their repositories have the open source edition available.
Using the non-open source version gives you access to things like openGL accelerated graphics and USB device support, which isn't so easy to set up if you've used the OSC.
I'm sorry if I say a bit like a freedom hater, but that's just the way that I've, again, I'm doing it for the sake of getting my work done.
This is purely for convenience, not for political brandy points, let's say.
Now, once you've opened up virtual box, you'll be presented with a screen and you'll see a bright blue button that says new.
So let's click on that.
This will open up the new virtual machine wizard. Just to let you know, I've already inserted my Windows XP disk into the drive.
So if you haven't done that so far, I would get on with that and then close down any automatic prompts that come up about viewing the contents of the disk or any such thing.
You won't need that.
As long as the computer recognizes that there's a disk in the drive, then we're good to proceed.
So click on next and the first thing it's going to ask you is for the name of your virtual machine.
This is just something personal to you. You can call it something insulting, if you like.
I don't know, win blows or put in some dollar signs, anything like that.
I'm just going to call it Win XP.
And actually, because I use it for this piece of kitsabalus, I'm also going to just type sabalus machine.
Once you've done that, you've got a couple of drop down boxes here.
One says OS type, if you've been installing something else on here, you've got various options, Linux, Solaris.
Funnily enough, OS 2, Mac OS X.
That must be a new feature. You can install Mac OS X. There you go.
And then it will give you a list of different versions.
And actually, as I've got Microsoft Windows selected, it goes everything from 3.195 Windows ME.
I had that on a computer once.
And it carries on all the way up to Windows 7.
I'm going to select Windows XP, because that's what I've got.
And click on next.
It then asks you how much RAM you want to give to your machine.
Now, I usually choose about 512.
I think originally that was just because that's the amount of RAM I had in my last computer.
So I thought to myself, well, my virtual machine can be at least as powerful as my desktop computer.
And well, I've got two gigs of RAM in my laptop.
And so that means that I'm still only using a quarter of what's available to me.
This is a very personal thing.
If you want to give it a little bit of extra juice, then obviously go up to a virtual box.
It suggests that you use about half of what your computer has available.
So if you've got an 8 gig of RAM machine, then give Windows XP 4 gigs that it probably will never use.
And then click on next.
And it starts to ask you about hard disks.
Now, I'm assuming that you don't already have a virtual hard disk image.
And so I'll just talk you quickly through that.
Click on create new hard disk and then next.
And it opens up the create new virtual disk wizard.
Now, this wizard is actually available to you from the main virtual box window.
If you had gone to file and create new or manage virtual disks or something like that.
And it's all there and you can get straight to this wizard.
Click on next.
Now, I usually choose dynamically expanding storage.
The advantage of this is that it only takes up as much space as it needs to.
I haven't had any problems with NTFS or FAT32 getting upset.
As far as Windows XP is concerned, it doesn't really even...
It thinks it's got a 20 gigabyte hard disk or whatever you choose to allocate it.
Even though that doesn't take up so much space on your physical disk until it needs it.
If you use fixed sized storage, then it will create a blank file like the size that you choose.
And that takes a little bit longer to set up as well.
So I generally don't do that.
So dynamically expanding storage, click on next.
Then asks you, what do I want to call this disk?
Well, I'm not going to give it the same lengthy name that I gave my machine.
I'm just going to call it WinXP.
And then I want a 20 gig hard disk.
I've never needed more than that.
Because I'm only using this machine for one purpose.
You can go back in future and add more disks.
Once you set your maximum size of the disk, as far as I'm aware, you can't make it any bigger.
But as I said, you can add more and more virtual disks as you choose if you're really going to be using...
Windows XP Power User within your virtual machine.
I kind of hope you're not, but again, they're going into the politics.
Okay, so click on Finish.
And it's created my virtual disk and finish again.
And that's it, my virtual machine is created.
From this point, you're going to need to go into the settings and tell it.
Or tweak things about a bit.
I'll just talk to you again, the process that I'm going to do.
I click on Set.
I've got my WinXP machine.
WinXP is the earliest machine selected.
I click on the yellow settings button.
And just go quickly through the tabs.
You've got Basic.
As you can see, it's just what kind of operating system is.
And you can change the name here if you wish.
Advanced Shared Clipboard By Directional.
That just means that if you control C, you can then control V in the other machine in your host or in your guest.
I've never really had that work too well, if I'm honest.
But again, I don't think it's really something that I actually use very much.
You don't need to worry too much about these little tweaky things.
OK, go on to System.
There, you can change the amount of bass memory or RAM that it has.
You can also choose extremely extended features.
And quite importantly here, you've got the boot or order.
Now, I always deselect floppy.
I don't even have a floppy disk drive, so that's not going to be useful to me.
There's no need to give it network there.
These are the sorts of things that you'd play with.
If you were, say, installing W and over the network or something like that,
you could set up your server and then you could put network into the boot order.
And you can shift them up and down using the Lara keys.
It's all great thing about virtual boxes.
Everything is actually blindingly obvious about how you set it up.
Provided you can find the settings.
And then there's a tab called Processor.
Now, I don't have the option of virtualizing one.
Being conscious of the amount of time I seem to be taking,
rambling on about all the tiny little settings you can adjust in your virtual machine.
I've taken this opportunity just to turn the volume down.
And I'm going to skip it on to maybe, well, basically,
I'm going to skip it on to all of the bits that are probably a little bit more important.
And most of the things I rammed about for the best part of 15 minutes
were actually pretty easy to work out for yourself.
So let's just skip straight to the bit where I was chatting about disks
and then networking.
Okay, going into display.
I always crank the video memory right the way up, 128.
Okay, now here's an important part.
You go onto the storage option.
This is something you actually need to do.
And you'll notice that in your storage tree,
you've got one IDE controller, you can add more if you wish.
And then you've got the top one on the top disk or VDI image
that's on the list there is your hard disk that you've just created.
This is where you could add more in if you choose.
And you've also got a CD, a little image of a CD there.
And if you click on it, then you'll see the attribute under the attributes.
It says CD, DVD, device, empty.
I can then select that and tell it.
It says host drive.
And for me, it's Toshiba, TSCorp, CD, DERW, whatever.
That will be whatever CD drive you've got in your machine.
So you go ahead and select your physical drive.
Now if at this point you're doing things differently for me.
Say you're installing your computer from an ISO file, for example.
Then you can actually select a file that's on your disk from this menu.
Just next to the drop-down menu, there's a button.
You click on that.
It opens up that virtual media manager.
And you can just add and then browse on your computer for the ISO image.
And virtual box will treat it like it's an actual CD.
It's an invaluable feature.
It saves me many CDs when testing out Linux distributions and the like.
Quickly moving on.
Audio.
I leave that on AC97.
Now, network.
I usually, for this purpose, I leave it on that.
What that means is that virtual box has sort of got to be built in DHCP server.
And so if this is set to that, then when your virtual machine fires up,
it will ask virtual box for a network address.
And I don't know if it's actually visible on the network.
But the important thing is that it will use your host machine as a as a gateway to the internet.
You can, you've got various things.
You can change the system.
If you put it on bridge adapter, then your virtual machine will actually use your network card
to then ask your router or your in-house network or however you connect stuff up to the internet and all that.
It will ask your in-house system for a DHCP address.
And then you could set up your router to allow access to various ports on your virtual machine.
It's a useful way if you're going, if you're actually setting up a virtual server or something,
then this is, you know, I would set it on bridge adapter so that so that this server can be accessed from the outside.
You're going into dangerous security territory there.
So I went and no recommendations from me on that part of it.
For this purpose, I would stick it on NET just because I'm, you know,
it allows the machine to have internet access or access to my network.
I can set up some shared folders, but it doesn't have access to the outside.
It doesn't have access to incoming connections and so you're protected from all those nasty people.
Okay, moving through this, enable your USB controller and then shared folders.
Now, I usually just add one.
I like to share my desktop folder.
So slash home slash rflab slash desktop with a capital D.
Then I can copy, you know, I can just dump files into my desktop folder.
They can be accessed by the machine and vice versa.
It's quite a slick sort of process.
It saves me messing around with USB drives and emailing stuff to myself and stupid little workarounds that you always think of.
When, you know, you've got this kind of how do I access that file without, you know,
without directly using it as I suppose you could set up something like Dropbox and then local syncing.
Maybe I'll just consider doing that.
That's not such a bad idea.
And all the good ideas to come to when you're rambling about stuff.
Anyway, let's let's crack on.
So click OK.
I've now got my desktop folder is going to be shared with the machine.
And I'll just, when I've finished the install process, I'll then tell you where to go from there.
So click OK.
And my machine is ready to go.
I'm going to click Start and up it will boot.
I'm going to, the first time, if this is the first time you run VirtualBox,
you'll get warnings about your host key, how to capture it and capture the nice and keyboard.
If you don't know, take note the default settings up to use the right control button.
Once you get used to using VirtualBox, that's fairly straightforward.
Now, my CD drive has just started worrying and the window setup has come up in a box.
If you want to put this full screen, you can do a control F at this stage.
That is the right control or your host key and F.
It will put it full screen.
And then you can switch out of this using the little thing that pops up at the bottom wall,
again, by pressing Control F.
I'm just going to leave this to do what it does now.
It usually takes about 10-20 minutes, I think, if I can remember correctly.
So go away.
Have a cup of coffee as Clotu would say.
Come back when Windows has finished installing.
It's going to ask me here about where to install Windows.
Well, you can only see one disk, which is the virtual one you've created.
And so I'm just going to press Enter.
It asks you what kind of file system you want.
I'm going to say FAT, just because I think that NTFS is Crab.
Excuse my language, maybe I'm wrong.
It might be fantastic.
Maybe there are features that are unknown to me, but at the end of the day,
you know, Windows file systems do leave a little to be desired when compared to open source counterparts.
So there we go.
Right, now that's just going to carry on doing what it does.
And we will continue this when we have Windows installed on the virtual machine.
Right, pardon the musical interlude.
Welcome back.
If you haven't done it yet, start up your virtual machine, your Windows XP machine,
or whatever it is you've been doing following this tutorial.
There's really only one more thing I want to mention at this stage.
And that is, if you're installing an operating system that has guest additions,
then the final stage of your initial setup is to install these.
Now it's actually very simple with Windows XP.
And I guess it probably is with some other operating systems, but I don't really know.
Things like FreeBSD and Debian, for example,
they have the guest additions within their package repository.
So if you're used to using those tools, then that's how you would do it.
With Windows XP, what you actually do,
take your mouse and go click on Devices at the top,
the white bar running along the top of your virtual machine.
And then go down that menu, there's one at the bottom that says,
install guest additions.
When you take a click on that, I was just about my discount.
Ah yes, it's about the discount, because the guest additions
is seen via virtual box as a CD.
And so then you get a wizard pop-up within your Windows machine,
and you just click yes, and then you click agree and next.
And install, I always select the direct 3D support just because it's there.
It says experimental, but I've been using it to play Windows games and stuff for a quarrel.
At least 18 months, I think.
So experimental in that they probably won't help you if it goes wrong,
but it works just fine.
So click install.
Basically all you're adding in here is things like seamless support,
which means that you could load up an application and then hold your host key, press L.
And it will then pop out, or your Windows sort of window.
Your window on your desktop that contains your virtual machine will disappear,
and the application itself will look as though it's running natively within your desktop environment,
which is quite pretty.
It also gives you support for seamless use of the mouse.
So if you're still using virtual machine within windowed mode,
you can move the mouse into and out of the virtual machine,
and it will just pick it up and drop it as required, same goes for the keyboard.
It's a good, definitely a good idea to install the guest additions.
It also includes video driver, which means that it will automatically resize the screen
when you go to full screen mode and things like that.
It doesn't take long by the time you've listened to this.
If you clicked it, when I clicked it, it should be finishing up around about now.
And that's that.
I would appreciate any feedback on this podcast,
or this is the first time I've ever recorded for Hacker Public Radio.
So if you'd like to drop me a line, you can find me on Twitter and Identica at iFab.
That's AIFAB, or you could drop me an email on iFab at loveabit.com.
That's L-E-V-A-B-I-T dot com.
And yes, that's all I have to say.
So thanks for listening, and enjoy your day.
Thank you for listening to Hacker Public Radio.
HPR is sponsored by Carol.net.
She'll head on over to C-A-R-O dot-E-T for all of us here.
Thank you very much.
You
