This tutorial will show you how to install Windows XP Professional Edition on VMware’s free VMPlayer in Ubuntu.
We will use the following applications:
- VMware Player
- Wine
- Qemu
- GnomeBaker
- Cabextract
First you will need to install vmware player. So in terminal type:
- sudo apt-get install vmware-player
And you will need wine. The easiest way I have gotten this working is through the add+remove applications menu in ubuntu.
Alternatively you can run this command:
- sudo apt-get install wine
Now you can download my 2G virtual disk file or create your own with Qemu.
Make sure you keep all the files you create or download during this tutorial in your current working directory. Which by default will be your home folder in terminal.
If you want a larger disk you will need to download Qemu. And install it via Wine. (Just run the .exe in Ubuntu)
After installing Qemu you will need to create your virtual disk with the following command:
- wine “c:\Program Files\Qemu\qemu-img.exe” create -f vmdk WindowsXPPro.vmdk 20G Formating ‘WindowsXPPro.vmdk’, fmt=vmdk, size=20971520 kB
For different sizes replace ‘20G’ with your desired size and change “size=x kB” to the proper size in kB I have a table below for some common sizes:
- 2G 2097152 kB
- 4G 4194304 kB
- 8G 8388608 kB
- 12G 12582903 kB
- 16G 16777216 kB
- 20G 20971520 kB
- 40G 41943040 kB
- 80G 83886080 kB
The math for converting from GB to kB is
- xGB*1048576=xkB
Now install GnomeBaker (if it isn’t already installed)
- sudo apt-get install gnomebaker
With your Windows XP CD in your drive; Run gnomebaker and select “Copy Data CD” and tick the “Create ISO only” box. I named my iso “winxppro.iso”
Now for some reason the boot sector of the xp install disk will not be in the iso, so we will need to download the xp boot floppies from Microsoft.
And save it to your home directory or current working directory.
In order for VMware to use the boot floppies we need to extract them with cabextract.
- sudo apt-get install cabextract
- cabextract WinXP_EN_PRO_BF.EXE -d ./
You will end up with these files from the exe:
If you want you can delete makeboot.exe and makebt32.exe, they are useless for us.
Now download my configuration file for vmware.
Run the .vmx file with vmware player.
Now comes the crazy part. 
When the xp boot menu asks for floppy 2 you will need unmount the floppy by clicking on the “floppy” button on the top menu in vmware player, delete or move the file named “cdboot1.img” and rename cdboot2.img to cdboot1.img. Then remount it by clicking the same “floppy” button. And so on for each floppy it asks for during the install.
Now the windows xp install might fail to move a file called “plugin.ocx” its useless, disregard it and skip the file.