Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 plays SuSE phone

JUST A FEW WEEKS ago Microsoft released an evaluation version for download of its Virtual PC technology, the result of an earlier Connectix acquisition. The software lets you create virtual machines on a "host" PC - and on each of these virtual machines you can install an OS.

We decided to give it a whirl.

The software from Microsoft is a 45 day trial version, amounting to a 19MB download from this this page.

It runs on Windows 2000 Pro and Windows XP Pro and needs a chip flying at over 400MHz, enough disk space to hold the virtual machines you create, level two cache, CD ROM and lots of memory.

The more memory you've got, the more you can allocate to your virtual OS.

What use is a Virtual PC? Developers will see the advantage of being able to run different OSes on one machine, but if you're a gamer you might like to run those games in a VM that don't seem to want to play on W2K.

We decided to give the Virtual PC software a go - and install SuSE Linux 9, which Juergen Geck, CTO of the firm pre-Novell takeover, bunged us after this article.

Windows 2000 workstation
running SuSE 9 install

Setup
Once you've installed the Microsoft software, a wizard will walk you through the process of setting up the appropriate place where it's going to go. The wizard checks out your hardware configuration and attempts to do its best with some virtual drivers, tells you where it's going to put the virtual machine, and lets you choose the amount of memory you'll allocate to it. The more memory you can give a VM, the better.

Unfortunately, there's only 128MB of memory in this Windows 2000 machine we're using. We donated a big chunk of that to SuSE for this experiment.

You can boot the OS that will live on the virtual PC from either the floppy drive or a CD. All we had to do was insert Disk One from the SuSE package into the CD drive, and off we drove. While the new OS is installing, the mouse pointer can be enabled to go inside the virtual machine - you can move it back to the host's window by clicking on the right ALT button while moving the pointer away from the window.

Before the install, we decided to put the Virtual PC on a one GB empty slave drive. Eek. The Linux files are going to be bigger than that. What's going to happen in an hour's time?

Our answer came with this warning...

That means you really have to think things through beforehand, rather than once you've started. Fortunately, you can close and save the state of your install, and then use the Virtual Disk Wizard to find a place for it to expand into safely.

That can take several hours. We set that process going and decided to give IBM PC DOS 6.1 a try, returning to SuSE later.

Five floppy disks to install PC DOS 6.1 - those were the days. A few minutes to install the Big Blue disks and we were there. A bit scary when it says it's going to format your drive C:, but that's actually protected by your virtual machine. Here's PC DOS installed. Long time no see, old boy. Here's a picture of a dir listing of our virtual DOS drive. All of the Virtual PC windows can be expanded to full screen size.

Conclusion
Plot your install to avoid the problems beforehand. And have heaps of memory and a fast machine before you give this software a try.

While we've tried it out here for fun, it's a serious application which many programmers might find useful, and that geeks might find not just useful, but sometimes invaluable. µ