A Win7 VM on Linux!

It's been a while since I played around with qemu-kvm, but there's an app I have to use for work which only has a Windows installer. BOO!

Setting up qemu on Linux was as simple as following these instructions:
https://www.linuxtechi.com/install-configure-kvm-ubuntu-18-04-server/

Getting Windows 7 to install without taking a million years required the virtio drivers as described for Windows 10 here: http://bart.vanhauwaert.org/hints/installing-win10-on-KVM.html

I then had problems with a seriously annoyingly jerky mouse pointer.  Searching around told me to add a USB tablet input device through virt-manager's VM setup.  That got that sorted.

So, some hours of searching and progress bars later, I have a working Windows 7 VM with the work app installed!  Hoorah!


Addendum:
I did try to get Windows 10 to work in a VM first, but it was sooooooo sloooooooow it was unusable.  Once I've got a server with more RAM, I might try to set it up with a main disk image copied into a RAM drive (with more storage on disk) and see how well that works.

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