Friday, January 25, 2013

Insert a CD image file in gnome-boxes

As I heard about the new Age of Empires II extension "Forgotten Empires" created not by Microsoft, but by an awesome community, I needed to play this game again! I don't like Wine that much as I once got a bunch of viruses having it just installed, therefore I decided to install Windows XP in a virtual machine.
I chose GNOME Boxes as it uses kvm. It was really fast and easy to install, I just needed my Windows-Installer-CD as an *.iso file.

However, I could not find any option to insert another *.iso image file to be mounted in the guest system. The user interface just does not provide to change the CD disc image - so we have to change the kvm options in another way. Open your terminal and type:

$ virsh edit Windows\ XP\ Pro.iso

(If you installed something else than Windows XP you might have to look in the folder .local/share/gnome-boxes/images/ how your machine is called.)
In this file search for the lines saying something like the following and exchange your iso-filename (+path):

<disk type='file' device='cdrom'>
   <driver name='qemu' type='raw'/>
   <source file='/home/tux/AoE.iso' startupPolicy='optional'/>

(If you need help using vim, check this out.)
Save it, reboot your Windows and enjoy having your disc image in the CD drive of the guest!

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