Installing Windows XP Service Pack 3 on Linux is very easy with Qemu. This requires a floppy disk image to load the SCSI drivers for the HDD image to be recognized by QEMU. But this does work.
Install the required components.
System information as of Fri 13 Jan 2023 09:30:12 AEDT System load: 0.0205078125 Usage of /: 13.0% of 915.82GB Memory usage: 7% Swap usage: 0% Temperature: 51.0 C Processes: 222 Users logged in: 1 IPv4 address for enp0s25: 192.168.1.2 IPv6 address for enp0s25: fdc8:1451:5fa9:4700:d250:99ff:fe0d:ab0f (base) ┌─jason-Lenovo-H50-55@jason⬎ └─◉ 5.1-~-08:32-⚫ ◉--[$] ☕ sudo apt-get install qemu-kvm qemu-utils |
Create a 30 Gigabyte disk image thusly.
(base) ┌─jason-Lenovo-H50-55@jason⬎ └─◉ 5.1-~-08:32-⚫ ◉--[$] ☕ qemu-img create -f raw win7.img 30G |
Creating a 30 Gigabyte HDD image to install Windows XP on.
The floppy image required may be found here: http://www.mediafire.com/?rd2hscy2iyp5sb8. Load this as the FLOPPYIMAGE as shown below, and then the installation may proceed. Press F6 when you being the installation and choose the correct 32-bit driver to enable the installer to see the raw HDD image. Then you may select the empty space to be formatted as NTFS. Use the comprehensive shell script below to run the actual VM, this enables sound and networking by default.
#!/bin/sh export QEMU_AUDIO_DRV=alsa export QEMU_AUDIO_DAC_FIXED_FREQ=48000 export QEMU_AUDIO_ADC_FIXED_FREQ=48000 export QEMU_ALSA_DAC_BUFFER_SIZE=4096 DISKIMG=win7.img FLOPPYIMAGE=viostor-0.1-30-floppy.img WIN7IMG=en_windows_xp_professional_with_service_pack_3_x86_cd_vl_x14-73974.iso VIRTIMG=virtio-win-0.1.229.iso qemu-system-x86_64 --enable-kvm -drive format=raw,file=${DISKIMG},if=virtio -m 8192 \ -net user -net nic,model=rtl8139 -cdrom ${WIN7IMG} -fda ${FLOPPYIMAGE} \ -drive file=${VIRTIMG},index=3,media=cdrom -boot d -rtc base=localtime,clock=host\ -smp cores=4,threads=4 -usbdevice tablet -device AC97 -cpu host -vga vmware |
https://archive.org/details/WinXPProSP3x86 Windows XP may be downloaded via this link, this is Windows XP SP3 32-bit.
This is an easy way to get Windows XP installed in QEMU. The only issue is that I could not get Internet Explorer to open a website and opening ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub was not working in the command-line FTP client either. But you could attach a drive containing the files instead. it does run well when set with a good amount of RAM and basic graphics, it is very dated.