Surely you jest. Windows 98? Yep. It's kind of Microsoft's bane. I didn't believe it when I heard it, but one of the target markets of Sun's Java Desktop System was the Windows 98 Desktop replacement market. I guess when you're looking at a site license for Win2K, WinXP or Windows 2003, or just the incrmental upgrades, $50 a pop for JDS looks like a pretty good deal, especially with Star Office thrown in the mix. And that also means it should run decently on on PC's that are a couple of years old.

Why Windows 98 under Solaris?

Most of the applications that I find myself lacking for Solaris X86 include the normal kinds of things that day-to-day desktop users need. A browser, a couple of of plugins, a couple of applications that probably everyone needs, like media players (other than the M$ one). And then there are the ubiquitous Windows upgrades, since it is Windows. In about 2 hours of part time work, I managed to load all the windows 98 updates, Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird, Adobe Acroread 6.0,Quicktime, the Macromedia Flash and Shockwave plugins for both Internet Exploder and the Mozilla family, Real Player, and TightVNC. Shock. The Solaris X86 community has been complaining about this for *years*. Adobe didn't do Acrobat Reader 7 for Windows 98, but Acroread 6 is better than the ancient Acroread 4.05 which was the last supported version for Solaris x86. Xpdf and Gpdf are allright but there always seems to be some document which doesn't render correctly. Macromedia finally got on board and there's a Flash plugin for Mozilla 1.4 for Solaris X86, though no Shockwave, and RealPlayer is still a noshow. If you really want RealPlayer for Solaris X86, Juergen Kiel in Germany figured out how to write a shim so we could use the UnixWare (This still has me baffled why UnixWare had a port and Solaris X86 did not) RealPlayer 8 plugin. You can find the code to make it work at The Solaris X86/Real Player Wedge web site. Now that I have all those tools, the other reason is Windows 98 is lightweight enoughto run decently under QEMU's emulation. As I pointed, it's pretty ubiquitous, so finding a copy should be dead easy, and it doesn't requires that NTFS which Solaris doesn't have any support for, unless you use my hack from yesterday to use Knoppix to get at the NTFS file system.

Installing Windows 98 under QEMU on a Solaris/X86 Host

So you need a couple of things. 1) Windows 98 (SE Preferably) media and license. An ISO image will do just fine to. 2) Disk space for the ISO and IMG files 3) a couple of hours or more depending on the speed of your machine, and the amount of memory you can give the QEMU guest VM. If you don't want to be flipping CDROM's more than once, I prefer to use unix "dd" to turn them into ISO images. I have finally gotten used to the Solaris vold (though I know people who still hate it, I have my days too) so here's how we do this:

    # Put the Win98 CD in your CD/DVD Drive
    $ eject -q cdrom       # or cdrom0 or cdrom1. Whatever your solaris system uses

    $ cd /export/src/iso          # and have at least 450MB of free disk space for the Win98SE ISO

    $ dd if=/vol/dev/rdsk/c1t0d0/win98 of=win98se.iso bs=10240k

    # If someone has a way of doing this with cdrw, let me know and I'll modify this. I don't see
    # a way around this other than stopping a copy halfway through, so that seems more of a hack
    # than using "dd" 

Next, we need to make an image for Windows 98 to reside in. We whip out qemu-like

    $ cd /export/src/images
    $  mkdir Win98SE; cd Win98SE
    $ /tmp/qemu/bin/qemu-img create -f qcow win98se.img 2G    # We can always grown this later

Next, I find it easier to prepare the disk by hand, than to let Windows 98 do it's thing. So I cheated to bootdisk.com and got a Windows 98 Boot disk, and started qemu with that like:

    # from /export/src/iso/Win98SE
    $ /usr/sfw/bin/wget http://www.mirrors.org/archived_software/www.bootdisk.com/winfiles1/boot98se.exe
    $ unzip boot98se.exe    # Since it is a self-un-archiving exe, unzip works fine on it.
    #
    # now start a basic qemu just to get the disk made
    #
    $ /tmp/qemu/bin/qemu -fda winb98se.IMA -boot a -hda win98se.img
    #
    # the normal windows 98 boot disk comes up, run fdisk, allocate the 2G of space to
    # primary DOS partition, then run format/s c:.  Once the format is complete, you can
    # reboot to verify you can see all 2G of the C: drive, or take it for granted that it
    # worked, and exit via "[CTRL-ALT-2], then "quit".

Next we setup the QEMU environment for loading Windows 98/SE. Decide how much memory you're going to use, etc, and use a variation of the script from the first day, to start qemu:

    $ /tmp/qemu/bin/qemu -cdrom win98se.iso -user-net -enable-audio \
                         -pci -m 256 -k en-us -boot d -hda win98se.img
    # and go through the normal Windows 98 install.
    # when complete, shutdown and if you're paranoid, make a backup copy of win98se.img.

Using the Solaris Samba server to provide writable space to the Windows 98 Image

Using ftp in a QEMU Guest OS can be kind of a pain, especially since the firewalling done by QEMU and it's slirp network stack. I've found that under a Solaris X86 guest, a ftp client called "lftp" actually works pretty good, and is available from blastwave.org using pkg-get. But trying to fight the Windows 98 Command.exe and FTP.exe is hopeless. So, it turns out to be very easy to enable Samba so you can use native Windows 98 File sharing back to the host.

    $ mkdir /export/src/samba; chmod 755 /export/src/samba  # or whatever permissions float your boat.
                                                              # only the QEMU guest instance will have access
    $ cd /export/src/samba
    # first thing to do is get windows 98 to properly use the HLT command so when
    # idle, it's not sucking the CPU like crazy. It's on the samba share so
    # we can just run the install once we have it mounted.
    #
    $ /usr/sfw/bin/wget http://www.user.cityline.ru/~maxamn/amnhltm.zip
    $ mkdir win98hlt; cd win98hlt; unzip ../amnhltm.zip
    #
    # start Windows 98 for the first time since the install, note the change in
    # the "-boot" parameter from "d" to "c"
    #
    $ /tmp/qemu/bin/qemu -cdrom win98se.iso -user-net -enable-audio -pci -m 256 \
                -smb /export/src/samba -k en-us -boot c -hda win98se.img
    #
    # This boots windows, and login normally.  Open a COMMAND prompt and  enter
    #
    C:\WINDOWS> echo "10.0.2.4 smbserver" > lmhosts
    #
    # or use notepad.exe, but be sure to make sure it saves it as "lmhosts", 
    # or you rename it from lmhosts.txt to lmhosts. This cost me about an hour 
    # today debugging this since notepad.exe added the ".txt" extension to the file.
    # when done, you should have a file called "C:\WINDOWS\LMHOSTS.
    #
    % Right Click on "Network Neighborhood", and select "Map Network Drive"
    # QEMU setup an internal IP address in the user-net stack that connects 10.0.2.4
    # as a proxy to the Solaris Samba server, that QEMU starts up when you request to
    # map a drive.  
    #
    % Map "\\SMBSERVER\QEMU" to drive "E:"
    #
    # If this happened succesfully, Windows opens an explorer window on "E:"
    #
    # In the command window you have open, type
    $ E:
    $ cd win98hlt
    $ AMNHLT.BAT       # This installs the sequence to use the CPU HLT instruction.
    # close the command prompt
    #
    % Open DISPLAY under the Control Panel and go to Effects and turn off most of the
    % visual effects. Things like annimation and such go a long way to making Windows 98
    % under QEMU not feel so sluggish.  While you're in the display panel, change
    % the resolution and color depth to something more pleasing.  The Cirrus Logic
    % GDM 5446 chipset can do 1280x1024 @ 16-bit color with little issue. There is
    % probably not much to be gained by going to 24-bit color, and it will be 
    % slower.  If you need 24-bit color, you should be asking yourself if you 
    % don't need a specific PC for that application.
    #
    # At this point, you can run windows update, and get as much stuff updated as
    # possible.  The updates don't take too long on a 2Ghz Athlon.  Once you have   
    # the updates done, it probably a good time to stop the system, and make a backup
    # of the current image.  Just in case something goes wrong.  My image turned out
    # to be about 250MB at the time of the great IE6 Update.

So at this point, you should have a working Windows 98 SE install, all patched up, with visual effects turned down to minimum and the HLT cpu instruction enabled, and you can start loading your favorite batch of applications. And making backups is as easy as copying one big file.