Windows 98 under Xen

As I continue to have more and more fun with Xen, I wanted to virtualize a couple old Windows systems. You won't believe my motivation... I only have one license for Windows XP, but wanted a couple other machines. Yes, that's right: I didn't want to pirate XP. Imagine that.

Since I have a couple copies of 95 and 98SE in the filing cabinet, it was time to give them a try. I couldn't get the wizard to work, but had better luck from the command line. The first trick was to add another packager, virt-viewer. The following launched an install:

# virt-install -n VM02-w98 -r 270 -f /dev/vg0/vm2w98 -l /net/scully/var/ftp/iso-w98se/w98se.iso -v --vnc

The first pass required that the virtual disk be intialized, and required a reboot of the guest. The reboot failed, however, forcing me to issue:

# virsh destroy VM02-w98; virsh undefine VM02-w98

This was followed by a second install command, which proceeded as normal.