Within Reason

FreeBSD 6.2-BETA1 and Win4BSD

Posted by Ceri Davies Fri, 22 Sep 2006 20:13:00 GMT

I had most of a day spare today, so I though that I’d try out the FreeBSD 6.2-BETA1 image. Having recently read about the Win4BSD beta from the Win4Lin people , I figured that this would be a good application to try out on the new FreeBSD install.

FreeBSD 6.2 is looking to be great, of course :) I wouldn’t mind seeing the release notes start to get pulled together though, as I can’t remember what’s happened to RELENG_6 in the last six months.

I didn’t have high hopes for Win4BSD in honesty, as the User’s Guide mentioned kqemu and I thought it was just going to be like QEMU, which I’ve used before, but had problems with. However, I liked the way that with Win4BSD the “Documents and Settings” were stored in the FreeBSD filesystem and shared back into the Windows guest, thus allowing them to backed up normally and shared between multiple guests. The same is done with printers.

From a dirt clean installation of FreeBSD 6.2-BETA1, here’s all I did. Note that that clean installation should include the source distributions.

• Install and configure X:

        # pkg_add -r xorg
        # xorgcfg

• Install utilities that I must have:

        # pkg_add -r rsync zsh bash portupgrade vim sudo
        # portinstall screen

The installation of vim pulled in the gtk-1.2.10_15 package which Win4BSD requires.

• Install a user account for myself:

        # pw group add users
        # pw user add ceri -c "Ceri Davies" -d /usr/home/ceri -s /usr/local/bin/zsh -g  users -G wheel
        # visudo
          (enable sudo access for group wheel)

• Install the compat5x package, required by Win4BSD:

        # pkg_add -r compat5x-i386
        # /etc/rc.d/ldconfig start

• Enable sound support:

        # echo 'sound_load="YES"'       >> /boot/loader.conf
        # echo 'snd_via8233_load="YES"' >> /boot/loader.conf

• Disable the MPSAFE network stack, which will otherwise cause complaints when Win4BSD loads the aio(4) kernel module. This can only be changed at boot time, so we have to reboot:

        # echo 'debug.mpsafenet="0"' >> /boot/loader.conf
        # init 6

When the system comes back up, we can crack on and install Win4BSD and Windows. We do most of this as a normal user now.

• Fetch the Win4BSD package, and install it. This will load the aio and kqemu kernel modules:

        % fetch ftp://ftp.win4bsd.com/pub/testing/pro/Win4BSD-1.0_63910_i386-freebsd.tbz
        % sudo pkg_add Win4BSD-1.0_63910_i386-freebsd.tbz

• Spool the Windows CD onto the hard drive.

        % sudo loadwinproCD /dev/acd0
        13 day(s) left in evaluation period.

        You may use Win4BSD Pro without entering a license code
        until the evaluation period ends.  If you already have 
        a full license code, you may enter it now.
        If you do not have a license code, you may enter it at
        any time in the future by running (as root):
                /usr/local/lib/win4bsd/bin/ask_license.sh

        Would you like to enter your license code now? (y/n) n
        Checking CDROM...
        Media found: Windows 2000 Professional (Service Pack 4)
        Loading CDROM... please wait...
        ..................................................
        Windows CDROM load complete.

• Start X:

        % startx

• Start the Windows installation. By default, it will go into a directory named winpro in the current user's home directory. I didn't want this, so I made a symlink first.

        % mkdir -p /images/win2k
        % ln -s /images/win2k ~/winpro
        % installwinpro -w win2kpro -g 4G -m shared

At this point, we're greeted with the Windows installer (yes, my screenshot has a xwd dump on the console ;-))

Now just follow the installation through as you normally would. When the installer finishes and the fresh Windows install is booted for the first time, a batch script is run automatically and does something clever (it flew by too quick to see what it did) and another reboot is enforced.

After that, you just have a normal Windows install which can be fired up any time with the winpro command. Networking and the internets just work (although I found that FTP was slightly dodgy, as per usual), and by browsing to \\host you get access to your own $HOME directory, the printers, and the "Documents and Settings" folders:

As for speed, it's pretty nippy and I can't say that I'm feeling the hit.