On Thu, 28 Oct 2004, Ivan Leo Puoti wrote:
How much effort would it take to get setup.exe on windows XP CD to run from begining to end.
I guess the setup wants direct hardware access.
The exe-part of the setup wants only the WinAPI, I guess. So, Wine may help a little bit here, IMHO. Only till the reboot.
Also, it probably reboots, and after reboot you'll be running on the windows kernel anyway.
Yes, and this is the place where setup process (not the loaded and running setup.exe binary) may want direct hardware access and where it definitely uses BIOS services, IMHO. :-P
I don't think this is really possible.
I think it could be done by using API emulator + Machine emulator (before the reboot and after the reboot). It may be Wine + BOCHS or Qemu, for example.
And there some work should be done to reach the end of setup sucessfully: you will need to transfer files from Wine-disk-drives to BOCHS disk-images. I think some not so complex bash script would suffice.
But then you can use only Machine emulator to go through all the setup process by virtually booting from Installation CD-ROM. So, why use Wine?
The second question is if somebody is willing to take on this task and how much would it cost me.
Not me. But can you define the point of using Wine to start a virtual installation of Windows XP?