Sometimes the Run box and the Command Prompt were locked down too, to get around that you could navigate to C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 in Explorer and run FTP.EXE, then use the "!" command to run whatever other commands you needed.
If Microsoft Office was installed, another easy way to run whatever you wanted despite lockdown settings was to open Excel or Word and go to the VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) window with Alt+F11, and use the Shell() function from the Immediate pane.
But there was an optional registry key that prevents the user from doing anything until after you were logged into the network. So practically, it was a login dialog.
But still no security.
> * I prefer to use VirtualBox because I am unable to make QEMU/KVM work, since I am not a rocket scientist. I don't see the advantage of a package manager when I have to edit random config files and hunt for tutorials. Why this can't be managed by APT or explained by the developer/maintainer? Seriously, why this needs to be another Wine-like experience is beyond me.
Not sure what this means to be honest: "I don't see the advantage of a package manager when I have to edit random config files and hunt for tutorials. Why this can't be managed by APT or explained by the developer/maintainer?" Nor this: "Seriously, why this needs to be another Wine-like experience is beyond me."
Of course, Virtualbox is substantially fine for this sort of thing, but Qemu/KVM isn't that absurd. Qemu is just an ordinary CLI program. Admittedly, forging a proper Qemu command for running a VM is an exercise in frustration because the CLI arguments have changed over time and some of them are now quite complicated to set up, but this is more FFMPEG-like than Wine-like.
That said, if you want to use Qemu/KVM more like a desktop virtualization solution, try libvirt with virt-manager. That will give you a GUI with wizards. It's a little weird, but very powerful.
Virtualbox may still be better for Windows 95. Honestly, 86Box may be best for Windows 95, being an emulator of older hardware rather than a VM.
To be honest, the qemu command line became more and more arcane over the years due to the large number of supported features, and is not very stable across major versions.
For example, until a certain point you could start a VM and install DOS/Win9x with
qemu-system-i386 -m 32 -hda harddisk.img -cdrom cd.iso -fda floppy.img -boot a
WARNING: Image format was not specified for 'harddisk.img' and probing guessed raw.
Automatically detecting the format is dangerous for raw images, write operations on block 0 will be restricted.
Specify the 'raw' format explicitly to remove the restrictions.
qemu-system-i386 -m 32 -drive format=raw,file=harddisk.img -cdrom cd.iso -fda floppy.img -boot a
I put up with qemu, but when possible I am happy to avoid it.
That said, while they can be annoying, there haven't been an enormous amount of these changes, which is why I liken it to FFmpeg, I still use the FFmpeg CLI all the time even though the CLI syntax for more advanced filtering has changed over time.
As someone who also has similar frustrations as the author I can explain.
I don't regularly run virtual machines, but I have been doing it for decades now, for a long time the install process was: install VirtualBox (or equivalent), tell what resources to allocate including disc images, run the vm, install the os, and your good to go.
To install Qemu/kvm/lib-virt you first have to find an installer tutorial. Then you hit up your package manager (like apt or pacman) to put the software on your machine (notice I didn't say install), then you have to go about installing and linking together a mess of programs, gotta tell systemctl to start up some stuff, gotta configure some networking stuff, then hope it all starts up. And it doesn't, you need to get some other packages to fix something else that your tutorial never mentions. Get that installed, manually after finding a supposed fix on some random message board, then maybe lib-virt fires up without issue. You point it at the resources, get it started up to install the os, and find that your vm is dog slow. Now you find yourself installing more packages, configuring more files with hardware memory addresses, and adding kernel boot flags just to get graphics working better. You can easily spend hours on this if you hit the right hiccups along the way. All because you wanted to spend an hour or two on a different problem.
I too wish the install for qemu was just easier, it would be nice if the packages for it came with some sane defaults or an installer script to get you up and running with a minimum install.
pacman -S virt-manager
...and the whole libvirt/KVM/QEMU dependency tree got pulled down, installed, fiddled whatever I needed to fiddle to make it start at boot, and it generally worked. I manage it with virt-manager on another machine.
Performance seems fine, and configuring the virtual machines themselves is not really much different with virt-manager than it is with virtualbox.
Like:
> edit random config files
I have no idea what config files you have to edit to run a relatively basic qemu incantation. My best assumption is that they mean libvirt, but I also don't really know what you have to edit to make libvirt work.
Since the OP is using Debian, I can check the Debian instructions for setting up a KVM libvirt setup on Debian.
https://wiki.debian.org/KVM#Installation
OK, this looks relatively straight-forward. You install packages, then you create VMs. It recommends AQEMU or virt-manager to use as a UI.
I am on NixOS because I like my coffee black, but I am kind of curious to see what the experience is roughly like, so maybe I can try to follow along in toolbox. It's not going to be identical but it shouldn't be any better of an experience than native Debian, for sure.
$ toolbox create --image quay.io/toolbx-images/debian-toolbox:12
...
$ toolbox enter debian-toolbox-12
$ sudo umount /var/libvirt
$ sudo umount /run/libvirt
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install qemu-system libvirt-daemon-system
...
$ sudo adduser john libvirt
$ sudo libvirtd &
$ sudo virtlogd &
$ sudo apt install virt-manager
$ virt-manager
Now I can create VMs! They don't really run in Toolbox for a variety of reasons that I could probably work around, but it's beside the point. On actual Debian this would be the end of things. Should be totally possible to install Windows 95.
--
Interestingly though, Debian recommends another tool called AQEMU before virt-manager. I think this is just a qemu frontend, so it probably doesn't need libvirt at all. (The instructions are unclear about this, which is very unfortunate.) I wonder how easy that is to use.
$ sudo apt install aqemu
$ aqemu
Thankfully, yes. I followed the VM wizard using defaults, selecting only Windows 9x. Added CD-ROM image of Windows 98 SE, added a boot floppy (actually the Japanese DOS-V boot floppy for Windows 98, since that's all I had locally, still works with some awkwardness.) Started VM. Formatted, installed. (Mostly. It's actually sitting here on "Updating System Settings..." with "7 minutes remaining". But I reckon it'll be done in a couple more minutes.)
OK, so there you go: if you would like to use qemu+KVM to install Windows 9x, you absolutely can do it using aqemu on Debian 12. No need to edit random config files or even bother with libvirt, if you don't want to.
Well, given how long this post is, it certainly doesn't do anything to disprove the notion that Qemu is less accessible and intuitive to use for ordinary users than Virtualbox, that's for sure. And to be sure, I 100% agree and empathize with the fact that it is not, because it isn't.
That said, this only caught my attention because it seemed like the OP had gotten stuck in an unusually deep rut, as I have basically only ever needed to edit configuration files with qemu when doing ridiculous things in libvirt (like PCI-e passthrough and Looking Glass and the like.) Beyond that, setup and usage of qemu is typically not too bad, with the rather large caveat that you kind of have to know what to do.
What this translates to is "I did not want to read the large and comprehensive QEMU/KVM documentation, go through each option one by one, take notes, and specify the ones I wanted."
Which is ... totally fine. `qemu` has a lot of options. But that's why they make frontends. You want a scary, difficult command to work with? Try `tc`. I would NEVER touch raw `tc` commands when configuring QoS - FireQoS all the way.
When I experimented with `qemu` to make a Debian-based headless hypervisor, I did have to put some time in it. I had to make some scripts to convert some easier-to-make "config" files into `qemu` commands (in addition to making the `tap` network interfaces for virtual networking). Got it working and it did its thing. It was cool that it could be done - launch VMs from a script with no need for a GUI.
But it's getting deprecated, iirc ?
https://github.com/virt-manager/virt-manager
It can't do literally everything Qemu/libvirt can do using only the UI, but given that it has escape hatches to directly edit libvirt configurations, and libvirt has escape hatches to directly pass arguments to Qemu, there's very little you can't do with it.
Most of us here take for granted just how arcane CLI actually is.
Even with FileVault2/FDE, it was still possible as long as you could unlock the drive. Now being able to authenticate as an administrator privileged user is (in some scenarios) a direct proxy for demonstrating ownership to recoveryOS, blocking access to the Utilities menu. It's a clever strategy from a security perspective.
Mixed, mostly past, tense because I'm not sure if this still works in 2024.
# create disk image
qemu-img create -f qcow2 win95.img 10G
# install win95 from iso
qemu-system-x86_64 -m 256 -hda win95.img -cdrom windows95.iso -boot d
# boot the disk
qemu-system-x86_64 -m 256 -hda win95.imgI know when I took a break from VMs for awhile and came back, I found virt-manager about 3 days after I started trying to crack the nut of qemu/kvm from only the command line.
For the uninitiated, I present this masterpiece: https://youtu.be/CTUMNtKQLl8
I think I need to address the many comments about my qemu/kvm rant... I think my experience could be best described by the user asciimov in his comment. I don't know what I do wrong, but I always get some error messages and barely make the virtualization work. Never even get to network the VMs.
If you just unplugged the ethernet cable at the right time, you would login straight away and even with a higher permission account compared to a normal login.
Nobody really cared about computer security back then.
Once the other students found out about this, there were many damaged Ethernet ports as they yanked the cables out of the ports violently. The school administrators eventually fixed the Internet filter vulnerability but the application one remained because not many people cared about it.
In this example it's definitely Windows 95, because "Setup MSN" is on the desktop at the end. This was never bundled with NT.
The NT4 login dialog looks like those of NT3.51 or Windows 2000 (and XP Pro if you switch do a domain-based login). See e.g. the one of Windows 2000 (on a machine visible not jointed to a domain) here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/uyau0h/is_it_som.... And AFAIK there's no way to bypass NT login dialog.
This is boring though! I remember when I had an early Windows 95 machine, I genuinely kind of had fun figuring how to break things. I mean, hell, when I discovered you could click "cancel" on the login screen and get a default user so I didn't need to get my parents to unlock it, it felt like I was accessing forbidden knowledge. I think even at the time I knew that was a bit janky. That was kind of the 90's computing experience though; everything was kind of held together with ducktape and prayers, and it kind of worked.
It's probably weird to have nostalgia for a time when everything was a little broken, but what can I say?
Take the most plain Ubuntu system and looking for "window manager" - there are dozens of hits! Install "wmaker" for that classical look and spend a few hours picking up the set of dockapps you like. Try a dynamic tiling manager and a static one.