After a whole lot of struggling, I’ve finally figured out what I think is the best way to install a Windows virtual machine under KVM, using the paravirtual (virtio) drivers.

The basic idea is to use the virtio devices from the initial installation to avoid all the work and hassles involved with changing the drivers later. This avoids mistakes which can lead to an unbootable guest or “Local Area Connection 2″ annoyances. There are two big problems, however. Finding the latest drivers is not easy (unless you pay for RHEL, which might make it easier). I’m not even sure the ones used here really are the latest, but they seemed to be the latest I could fine. Second, the limitations of the virt-manager + libvirt + KVM stack mean you can’t connect both an installation CD (image) and a virtio driver CD. Only one virtual CD is allowed by some level in that stack; I’m not sure which one or why.

1. Download the virtio drivers. The copy I used was virtio-setup-200908.iso as linked from an article titled
   Preview of Redhat 5.4 Windows Virtio Drivers Part 1 from Haydn Solomon’s blog.
   wget http://linux-kvm.net/sites/default/files/virtio-setup-200908.iso
2. Download a copy of my convert-iso-to-floppy script which uses mkfs.msdos to create a floppy image and copies the files from the virtio .iso file using loopback mounts, which is explained by untitledfinale.wget http://coderich.net/downloads/convert-iso-to-floppy
3. Make the script executable.chmod +x convert-iso-to-floppy
4. Run the script. ./convert-iso-to-floppy virtio-setup-200908.iso
5. Create a new virtual machine as you normally would for a Windows guest, stopping just before clicking Finish.
6. If you have a new enough version of virt-manager, you can check the “Customize configuration before install” checkbox. Otherwise, click Finish, stop the virtual machine, open the details, reconnect the CD (or other installation media) if necessary, and reconfigure the guest to boot off the CD (or other installation media).
7. Delete the IDE disk device and re-add the storage as a Virtio disk.
8. Change the NIC’s device model to virtio.
9. Add the image that convert-iso-to-floppy created (which will be named the same as the iso, but with an .img extension) as a virtual floppy device.
10. Set the floppy to be readonly for safety. (This is optional, but it makes me feel better.)
11. Switch to the console view, run the virtual machine, and start the installation as normal.
12. When the disk configuration step comes up, no disk will be detected. This is normal.
13. Click Load driver…
14. Windows will automatically search the virtual floppy drive and find the drivers.
15. Select the virtio block storage and virtio network drivers for the Windows version being installed, using the control key to select multiple items as always.
16. Click Next.
17. Proceed with the installation as normal.
18. Delete (or disconnect) the floppy device, as desired.
19. Reconfigure the boot options, if necessary, as desired.
20. Disconnect the CD device, if necessary and desired.

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So Ubuntu Lucid is changing the window title bar button placement. I’m not sure why…other than Mark Shuttleworth seems to love copying Apple. A colleague pointed out Mark Shuttleworth’s Window indicators post as the reason for this change.

However, this change made me realize one thing… I never use the menu from the title bar. I use it on the task bar a lot (for “Close”, “Always On Top”, “Move to Another Workspace”, and “Always on Visible Workspace”, in that order of frequency), but not from the title bar. This is a random observation, nothing more.

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I just got back from a talk given by Richard StallmanUniversity of Minnesota. It was about software freedom. If you’re looking for more information, I would encourage you to check out gnu.org and fsf.org. I’m not going to repeat all the points. I just wanted to note one thing:

I understand his push for “GNU/Linux” a lot more now. It’s one thing to talk about credit–there I disagree, because I don’t want to call it “GNU/Linux/X/GNOME/OpenOffice.org”. However, he made the point that calling the distro “Linux” points all the attention towards Linus, who isn’t pushing software freedom. I hadn’t thought about that before.

On a side note, RMS pronounces it “GNU slash Linux” or “GNU plus Linux”, where I think “GNU Linux” is a totally more reasonable… After all, nobody pronounces the slash in “and/or”.

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Check out my photos of an exploding Ubuntu CD.

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gnome-blog, version 0.8 has support for WordPress blogs. However, it seems that selecting wordpress appends “wordpress/xmlrpc.php” to the URL. This results in silent failures if you enter, for example: http://coderich.net I ended up choosing Self-run Other, then entered http://coderich.net/xmlrpc.php as the URL, and everything works. Yay!

Update: Apparently gnome-blog doesn’t set the title properly with BloggerAPI. I switched to MetaWeblog in the options and now it works!

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