Win95 on a virtual machine

[Homeground]

Hi,

I'm using Linux Ubuntu as my main OS, but I'd like to used Windows95 from time to time. I have an old disk I haven't used for about 10 years. But rather than going through the hassle of installing it on a hard drive, I thought I'd give a virtual machine a try. Can anyone recommend one? How much slower would it be than the real thing?

 

[vacunita]

Oracle VM VirtualBox is good.

As far as performance, that depends on what resources you assign to it.

But as far as win95 goes, I think the performance would be much better than on actual Win95 era hardware if only because the Win95 doesn't need much, and your Linux machine should have more than enough to assign to it. Starting with processor power.




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Phil AKA Vacunita
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Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

Web & Tech

 

[BadBigBen]

I second the notion on the Oracle VirtualBox software, mainly because it is FREE and easy to use...

good luck on your endeavor...


Ben
"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."
How to ask a question, when posting them to a professional forum.
Only ask questions with yes/no answers if you want "yes" or "no"

 

[Homeground]

Thanks, I'll give that one a go.

 

[Homeground]

I gotta say it isn't that easy to use. The instructions can be quite obscure. I wanted to install it from my old and legal Win95 disk. But I couldn't persuade the installer to do it. It doesn't seem to recognize real disks, only virtual ones. But I've got the thing up and running. What I can't figure out is how to load some files and programs into it, either from my hard drive or CD-ROM. Copy/paste doesn't work. I've been through the manual looking for some clue, but ran up against the same problems as with the install. Obscurity.

1.8.4. Changing removable media
While a virtual machine is running, you can change removable media in the "Devices" menu of the VM's window. Here you can select in detail what VirtualBox presents to your VM as a CD, DVD, or floppy.

Not in my VM window. At the top there's "File" "Machine" and "Help". Below that there's "New" "Settings" "Show" and "Discard". There is no tab called "Devices". I can find no way of interacting with my actual hard disk or actual CD-ROM. Can anyone help

 

[flyboytim]

Congratulations on getting Windows 95 running - as you say it isn't all that easy. In its day, Windows 95 was a doddle compared to setting up Windows for Workgroups 3.11 on a real MS_DOS 6.22 computer! But there were not the limitations and constraints that VirtualBox imposes on the VM, on a legacy hardware platform. It was then possible to go and add a floppy or Zip drive, a network card or Laplink files via the serial or parallel ports to another PC.

The key to getting files and data in and out is networking, and here's the next difficulty. TCP/IP networks were new to Windows 95, and OSR 2 does not install the TCP/IP stack by default, if I remember correctly.

In those days Novell Netware was the commercial choice of network, or the Microsoft NetBEUI protocol for small workgroups. Not much use today though.

Rather than a long essay here, Google

Windows 95 networking in Virtualbox

for a range of information.

The plan would be to get the TCP/IP protocol installed, and connect to your home network (that gives you internet connectivity), share folders on your Host machine and on the Windows 95 guest virtual machine. That way you should have a means of transferring files.

Today's Windows security will get in the way of seeing files from the Win95 machine, but the other way around should be no problem - i.e. copying to a shared folder on the Win95 VM. The alternative would be FTP - File Transfer Protocol - a way of sending files over internet connections.

Although you could have rudimentary internet connectivity, most of today's webpages would not display on a browser that could run in Win95. Most Of the Web was text-based in 1995. Netscape Navigator V1.0 only appeared in December 1994. Netscape's forerunner, NCSA Mosaic was first released in 1993, so the Internet hardly had much of a presence then. Academic institutions used mostly text-based email and file transfer protocols to communicate in those days.

Remember that CD-ROMs were also new to PCs in 1995, and USB devices were not fully supported on Windows until XP SP2!

VirtualBox also does not support devices such as the soundcards that Windows 95 might have used.

The Virtualbox forums have a load of information and Google is invaluable. Let us know how you get on, especially if you have specific problems.

 

[Homeground]

^Okay, I'll have a go at all that. Thanks for the info.

 

[BadBigBen]

Perhaps you can find some info in the following links:

Text:
Tutorial: Windows 95/98 guest OSes

https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=9918

Video:
Complete walk-through install of Windows 95 in Virtualbox (1 of 2)

http://menga.net/14291

since I do not have a copy of Win95 anymore, I can't really test...

but I still stand on the point that VB is easy to use, but that Win95 is a problem, mainly due to the fact that one needs to use FAT16 first instead of FAT32 (many forget this little part)...

PS: one could also create a FIXED size disk (2GiB max FAT16 limit under Windows 95 (NT and other free DOS versions allow more)), then mount this VDI file under Ubuntu and copy all the files needed by the W95 setup, then boot to the VBox Win95 using the DOS disks and install away...

Mounting partition from VDI fixed-size image

http://wiki.przemoc.net/tips/linux#mounting_partition_from_vdi_fixed-size_image

Ben
"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."
How to ask a question, when posting them to a professional forum.
Only ask questions with yes/no answers if you want "yes" or "no"

 

[flyboytim]

Thanks for those links Ben, the video tutorials by Rich Menga (number two is here

http://blip.tv/menga/complete-windows-95-installation-in-virtualbox-part-2-of-2-3826433

) are pretty good. I certainly learnt a thing or two I had long forgotten.

I'm tempted to dig out that old Win95 disk now...

 

[BadBigBen]

Flyboytim,

thanks for posting the follow-up video, I missed that...

Ben
"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."
How to ask a question, when posting them to a professional forum.
Only ask questions with yes/no answers if you want "yes" or "no"