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Ubuntu running Windows in VMware Player

I managed to destroy my Windows XP partition a few weeks ago while trying to resize it. Fortunately I made a backup. I decided to try to run Windows inside a virtual machine. After removing the broken NTFS partition, I reused the free space to create a new /home partition.

I created a disk image with QEMU, and ran a Windows XP installation on it through VMware Player. And I must say, it works perfectly. I am even able to connect to USB devices such as a PocketPC.

In the picture below I am debugging a Compact .NET Hello World application in Visual Studio in Windows in VMware. The application is running on the PDA that is attached to the PC.

Debugging a PDA with Windows running in VMware on Ubuntu

Here is a screenshot of Visual Studio running the PocketPC emulator:

The Visual Studio PocketPC emulator in VMware Player

Speed is not an issue: the image runs almost at native speed thanks to the kernel modules. Whenever I need Windows (I rarely do), I just fire up VMware Player, and I am able to dig right in because it saved the previous state. And when I’m finished I just suspend the virtual machine.

I don’t think I’ll go back to a dual-boot system soon.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 at 5:28 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

  • Manuel
    Hi there,

    What version of Visual Studio are you running?
    I'm trying to use the windows mobile 2005 emulator in a windows XP virtual machine but no luck so far.
  • I used Visual Studio 2005 with the Windows Mobile 5.0 emulator as well, so that should work. Make sure that you mount /proc/bus/usb first. There is a thread at the Ubuntu forums that describes how you can do that.

    I am currently using VirtualBox. The binary version (not the open source one) has support for USB pass-through as well.
  • Manuel
    Thanks for the heads up. I actually have no issues with USB--using Mandriva 2007.1 here. It's just the emulator that won't start. I'll install VS 2005 and see where I go from there.

    Regards,

    Manuel
  • You're welcome, good luck!
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