Installing Windows 98 using Qemu in postmarketOS

So, in the previous article I installed postmarketOS on my Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 (7 inches), and I wanted to create a website on it. But I was encouraged to create my personal website on Azure, so in the end I didn’t install a web server on the tablet.

I was wondering what will be the performance of Qemu on my tablet, emulating a x86 processor on a ARM device, and I installed qemu in the tablet, in the first place:

sudo apk add qemu qemu-img qemu-system-i386

Then I tried to run qemu directly from the console. Qemu has a built-in VNC server, so I was hoping to connect from my PC using TightVNC, but it was a complete failure, because I didn’t knew that postmarketOS has a firewall that I had to deal with. So, after hours of googling, I found that I could install a package that enables VNC access from the firewall without having to mess with configuration files:

sudo apk add -i postmarketos-config-nftables-vncserver

Now I can run qemu, but I first downloaded Windows 98 SE from WinWorldPC and unzipped the file containing the ISO file of the installation disk.

After that, I created a small (1 GB) hard disk image, because my tablet only has about 2 GB free on disk:

qemu-img create -f qcow2 w98.qcow2 1G

Now I can run the Windows Setup from qemu. I am emulating a machine with 64 MB of RAM, booting from CD-ROM:

qemu-system-i386 -cdrom win98.iso -boot order=dc -drive file=w98.qcow2 -m 64

The setup process was very slow, but I felt happy when the graphical setup started:

After passing through the installation steps, I left the installer make its work:

It is sad that only remains 301 minutes for the installation to complete…