Introduction

Occasionally, you will need to use programs that are only available for Windows. There are a few solutions to this problem, and one of them is VMware. VMware is a virtual machine, which can be used to run Windows 9X/NT/2k, Linux, MS-DOS, and even FreeBSD. In this article, I'll demonstrate how to run Windows 98 in VMware.

Getting Ready

First, you must get an evaluation license from the VMware web site. Make sure the license you get is for a "VMware Workstation for Linux". On the web site, you will have to fill out a form to get the license. After doing so, you'll get an email with the license data.

VMware is a Linux binary, so make sure you are running the Linux compatibility module. If you aren't, or you're not sure if you have it installed, you can install it with the steps below.

# cd /usr/ports/emulators/linux_base
# make install distclean

I used my laptop as the test machine throughout this article. It is a Celeron 466 MHz with 160MB of RAM, and about 700MB left on the hard drive. It is running FreeBSD 4.2-STABLE. I think a 400 MHz cpu with 96MB of RAM and 600MB left on the hard drive should be sufficient. The faster the cpu and the more memory you have, the better off you will be.

Installation

Installation is quite simple.

# cd /usr/ports/emulators/vmware2 && make install clean

The build process will ask a few questions. Below are the questions and my answers:

• Do you want to use netgraph bridging?

  Since you can use the network without bridging, I chose no here.

• What will be the IP address of your host on your private network?

  It's the IP address of the interface vmnet1, the network interface seen by the host OS (the one running VMware, in this case, FreeBSD). You can accept the default, but you must choose a subnet that is different from your LAN's subnet. vmnet1 is created at boot by the vmmon module.

The next few questions are about the netmask (it depends on the IP chosen in the previous question) and choice confirmation.

When installation finished, I rebooted the laptop. After boot, running ifconfig -a shows a new interface:

vmnet1:	flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
	inet 192.168.254.1 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast
	  192.168.254.255
	ether 00:bd:c9:03:00:01

Running kldstat should show:

% kldstat
Id Refs Address    Size     Name
1    6 0xc0100000 202388   kernel
2    1 0xc0bd3000 2000     rain_saver.ko
3    1 0xc0be1000 2000     rtc.ko
4    2 0xc0be4000 11000    linux.ko
5    1 0xc0bfe000 9000     vmmon_up.ko
6    1 0xc0c08000 4000     if_tap.ko

vmmon_up, if_tap, and linux are the required modules to run VMware.

Before configuring VMware, the license must be saved in your home directory as ~/.vmware/license2.0.

Configuration

Now that VMware is installed, we need to configure a virtual machine for Windows98 (you can configure many virtual machines).

Each time you use VMware, the Linux process file system (linprocfs) must be mounted. To mount it, do this as root:

# mount -t linprocfs /proc /usr/compat/linux/proc

Note: You need to be root to mount linprocfs, but running VMware as root is a very bad idea.

To launch VMware, simply run it as your regular user on the command line:

% vmware

After VMware begins, you need to go through and configure VMware. The steps I chose are below. Click the links in each step to see a screenshot of the step.

• First, you'll be prompted with a window to configure a virtual machine.

• In order to do that, use the Configuration Wizard.

• Chose Windows 98 as the guest OS.

• Each virtual machine has it's own directory.

• To install the guest OS, you'll need to set up a virtual hard drive. It an be a file or a physical disk, but a file is easier deal with.

• For the disk size, I chose 500MB. That should be enough to install a minimal Windows 98 and some applications, and it can be saved on a CD-RW.

• Next, enable and choose the right device for the CDROM drive. To boot from the CDROM, the drive has to be connected. In this case, I'm installing Windows 98 from CDROM.

• Now it's time for the floppy configuration.

• For the network settings, I chose "Host-only".

• The configuration is now done.

• The Configuration Wizard didn't ask me the amount of memory for the virtual machine. You can set it in the settings menu, then Configurator Editor.

• It also didn't ask about the mouse. To configure your mouse, choose Settings, then Configurator Editor and choose the right mouse type and device.

• Now it's time to install Windows 98. Insert the CDROM into the drive and click the "Power On" button to launch the virtual machine.

• Once the virtual machine boots, the installation will start as it would on a real machine. The install process was quite long on my laptop but finished without problems. When the install is over, Windows 98 should boot up.

• For the moment, VMware only uses a 640x480 resolution window with 16 colors. Play with Windows for a few seconds, then stop VMware. After Windows shuts down, a VMware hint window appears mentioning VMware Tools. VMware Tools allow you to use a virtual SVGA card with more colors when you run the virtual machine, so it's a good idea to install these tools.

• Click on "Power On" again, wait for Windows to completely start, choose Settings, and then choose the VMware Tools Install. After some help screens, choose the floppy unit and launch VMware Tools.

• At the end of installation, the "Display Settings" and notepad appear. Follow the instructions in notepad.

  With the VMware SVGA (FIFO) driver (the driver that came with the VMware tools) you can have up to a 16bit color display. The full screen button didn't give me good results, but if I chose a 1024x768 monitor in the Display Settings window, I have a 1024x768 VMware window.

Networking

Now it's time to configure networking in the virtual machine. Go into the network configuration settings. You should see AMD PCNET Family Ethernet (PCI and ISA). That's the virtual ethernet card.

Select the TCP/IP line and specify the IP address with one from the subnet chosen for the vmnet1 interface. For example:

192.168.254.200

In this case, the netmask (Subnet Mask field) would be:

255.255.255.0

Now you can configure the gateway. The gateway IP in our case is 192.168.254.1. Put this in the New Gateway field and click the add button.

Once you're done with that, you should be able to ping the interface from our Guest OS -- Windows 98. You should also be able to ping any other interface installed on the FreeBSD box (the Host OS).

From the Host OS, you can directly ping the Guest OS with:

% ping 192.168.254.200

For the moment, you can only talk between the Guest OS and the Host OS. To talk to the rest of the LAN from the Guest OS, you have to enable natd(8) on the interface used to access the LAN. If you don't know how to configure natd(8), read the RUNNING NATD section of it's man page.

With natd(8) running, you should now be able to ping and access other computers on your LAN from the virtual machine, but you won't be able to directly reach the virtual machine from the other systems on the LAN.

The solution to this problem is to add a specific route on all the machines by using:

# route add 192.168.254.200 192.168.1.202

This creates a route to 192.168.254.200 (the Guest OS) with 192.168.1.202 as the gateway (the Host OS).

Networking with a virtual machine is really amazing. As you can see here, I can access the Internet from the virtual machine (I used my proxy, a FreeBSD machine running Squid, to provide access).

I even tried to scan ports on the virtual machine from another computer on the LAN:

Starting nmap V. 2.53 by [email protected] ( www.insecure.org/nmap/ )
Host vmware (192.168.254.200) appears to be up ... good.
Initiating TCP connect() scan against vmware (192.168.254.200)
Adding TCP port 139 (state open).
The TCP connect scan took 3 seconds to scan 1523 ports.
For OSScan assuming that port 139 is open and port 1 is closed and
neither are firewalled
Interesting ports on vmware (192.168.254.200):
(The 1522 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: closed)
Port       State       Service
139/tcp    open        netbios-ssn             

TCP Sequence Prediction: Class=trivial time dependency
                         Difficulty=3 (Trivial joke)

Sequence numbers: C6EA9 C6EBF C6ED1 C6EEA C6F02 C6F1E
Remote operating system guess: Windows NT4 / Win95 / Win98

Nmap run completed -- 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 4 seconds

Starting nmap V. 2.53 by [email protected] ( www.insecure.org/nmap/ )
Host vmware (192.168.254.200) appears to be up ... good.
Initiating TCP connect() scan against vmware (192.168.254.200)
Adding TCP port 139 (state open).
The TCP connect scan took 2 seconds to scan 1541 ports.
Initiating FIN,NULL, UDP, or Xmas stealth scan against vmware (192.168.254.200)
The UDP or stealth FIN/NULL/XMAS scan took 7 seconds to scan 1541 ports.
Interesting ports on vmware (192.168.254.200):
(The 3079 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: closed)
Port       State       Service
137/udp    open        netbios-ns              
138/udp    open        netbios-dgm             
139/tcp    open        netbios-ssn             

Nmap run completed -- 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 9 seconds

Printing

I noticed that the parallel port didn't seem to be working, so I couldn't print from the virtual machine. As a work-around, I installed a PostScript printer, outputted what I wanted to print to a file, and printed from the Host OS.

How did I get the files to the Host OS? The easiest way is to share a directory on the virtual machine and use sharity-light to access it from FreeBSD.

To install sharity-light, look no further than the ports collection:

# cd /usr/ports/net/sharity-light
# make install distclean

On the virtual machine, allow file sharing and share the C:\ drive. On the FreeBSD system, add this line in /etc/hosts:

192.168.254.200	vmware

Do the following as root on the FreeBSD system:

# shlight //vmware/c /mnt
Password:
Using port 1024 for NFS.
# cd /mnt
# ls
AUTOEXEC.BAT  CONFIG.SYS    MSDOS.---     Program Files WINDOWS
BOOTLOG.PRV   DETLOG.TXT    MSDOS.SYS     SETUPLOG.TXT
BOOTLOG.TXT   FRUNLOG.TXT   Mes Documents SUHDLOG.DAT
COMMAND.COM   IO.SYS        NETLOG.TXT    SYSTEM.1ST

To unmount /mnt, do:

# unshlight /mnt

Now you can access Windows' file system and do reads and writes from your FreeBSD system.

About Performance

On my "low-end" laptop, the speed is fast enough for most applications, but I think that games, an mpeg player, etc., would be terribly slow.

To reduce CPU usage when the virtual machine is started, go into the Devices menu and disconnect RTC. VMware doesn't save this setting, so to avoid doing it every time I use VMware, I added this at the end of ~/vmware/win98/win98.cfg (the virtual machine's configuration file):

rtc.startConnected = FALSE

You can find more information on performance tuning on VMware's web site.

- Marc Fonvieille

Return to the February 2001 Issue