brianredbeard/ie-vm

modern.ie VMs under KVM/QEMU

modern.ie VMs under KVM/QEMU

Automates the process of getting the modern.ie images and converting them for usage with KVM. There are 3 scripts:

ie-urls.sh

Attempt to parse the relevant "Batch File Download" URLs from the modern.ie page

fetch.sh (url)

Given a URL to a .txt file full of URLs (like what MS link to), fetch all files within, uncompress and convert into a QCOW2 file for use with QEMU, which will be waiting for you in the current directory.

start.sh (QCOW image)

Fetch virtio.iso if not already there, and start the image with reasonable options

Using

1. Ensure depenencies are installed with apt-get install wget unzip qemu-system-x86 qemu-utils
2. Run ie-urls.sh to list available Windows / IE images, or go to http://modern.ie and copy the "Batch File Download" URL for the Linux/VirtualBox VM for the version of IE you want.
3. Run fetch.sh http://../IE11.Win8.1.For.LinuxVirtualBox.txt and wait. The multiple wgets will fight for the screen somewhat.
4. Run start.sh (name of image). Or omit the name if you want to run the most recent QCOW2 file.
5. Install the virtio drivers from the CD drive. Change anything else you fancy whilst you're there, e.g. home page to http://10.0.2.2:8000 (your laptop's port 8000).
6. Shut down windows, note qemu is still running.
7. At the QEMU command prompt, run commit ide0-hd0 to write changes back to the QCOW2 file.
8. Delete the workdir-* once you're happy everything worked. If something went wrong you can run ./fetch.sh again to regenerate the QCOW2 file. It will not re-download files.

After this, you won't ever need to shut windows down properly, since by default start.sh writes changes to a temporary file and does not change the QCOW2 file.

Code 39 when installing VirtIO drivers

Vista and WinXP can use the Win8 driver incorrectly. Select the directory manually and then install.

Creating a specialised VM

If you want to have a VM that's customised for your project somehow, you could just copy the .qcow2, however that's a lot of diskspace. Instead you can create a new image that's based on the contents of another file, for example:

qemu-img create -f qcow2 -b "IE9 - Win7.qcow2" MyProject.IE9.Win7.qcow2