In the past several tweaks were necessary to install a guest OS inside of Bochs. Nowadays, it is almost the same as installing it on a real machine. There are only a few Bochs specific issues you should know about. Note that we cannot give you a full installation guide if you don't know how to install an OS in the real world. The following remarks apply to all guest OS installations. Some specific issues are reported in the next sections.
First of all, you need the installation media or image (floppy/CD/DVD). For platforms that don't support raw device access it might be necessary to create an image from the media. Please read the message regarding software licenses in Section 1.6 before you install or use a commercial guest operating system in Bochs.
Then you need to create a hard drive image with bximage. For the required size see the documentation of the OS you'd like to install. See Section 9.22 how to create the image.
Finally you have to create configuration for your guest OS. You can edit the sample configuration distributed with Bochs or use the configuration interface to adjust the settings. Check the documentation of your guest OS for the required memory size, cpu speed and supported hardware.
What disk images are available. What works Known problems
Contributed by Alexander Schuch.
Knoppix is a live CD (700M) or live DVD (3.2G) based on Debian GNU/Linux, with lots of ready-to-run programs (web browser, office suite, a few games, and more), using KDE as desktop environment. It can be booted directly from CD, without any installation needed. You can download it from knoppix.org.
As Knoppix runs completely from CD/DVD, you don't need to setup a hard disk. You just need to set up the location of the downloaded ISO image in your bochsrc, and make Bochs boot from it. Because Knoppix contains a graphical user interface, and has no other storage space but the emulated RAM, it needs at least 128MB of it, see megs option. Furthermore, you need to enable VBE support in Bochs (see Section 9.18).
There is nothing more to do! Just start Bochs and wait for Knoppix to load...
Note: You are logged in as normal user, if you want to become super user, just su. There is no password needed (empty password).