Like many other developers and geeks (according to what I read on twitter yesterday), I tested the developer preview of Windows 8. But I only wanted to do a quick and dirty test. Then I installed Win8 in VirtualBox:
- 1 – Download the 4.5GB iso from HERE.
- 2 – Mount this iso on a virtual DVD player with Daemon Tools.
- 3 – Create a virtual machine (I selected a Win7 64-bit system, with 40GB of HDD) with VirtualBox, I called it Win8Box.
- 4 – Start the virtual machine and select the virtual DVD player to launch Win8 installation.
The Win8 dev preview is a 64-bit version only with developers tools (Windows SDK for Metro style apps, Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Express for Windows Developer Preview). DirectX 11.1 SDK is also present…
Once the installation is completed, Win8 looks like as follows:
There is a horizontal slider to move the scren left to right. Win8 interface is designed for tablets! To get the usual desktop, you have to click on the small desktop icon. An there, we have the Win7-like desktop. Win8 comes with a new task-manager:
Win8 is compatible with Win7 apps:
On x86 and x64 PCs, Windows 8 supports Windows 7 desktop applications and devices so you don’t have to compromise or give up what you’re used to. On these PCs, your existing Windows 7-based applications just work.
Okay with VirtualBox, you don’t have access to OpenGL stuff, and Direct3D support is limited, but D3D9 seems to work. I successfully launched MSI Kombustor with the Direct3D 9 render path:
Here are various links about Win8:
This will be the Last Windows OS with 32 bit support.. All succiding Windows after Windows 8 will be 64 bit only..
Which perfectly makes sense imho. 32 bit is a skeleton in the closet now – as long as it’s supported, lazy developers will never port their stuff to 64 bit, despite its obvious benefits and it’s just an extra pressure on OS developers to try to keep up compatibility with old systems.
Btw am i the only one who wants to tap the screen and to scroll by hand etc when looking at Metro? 😀
I found Win 8 a pain to install in virtual box. Took ages to install and the installer kept getting stuck extracting files, error codes, etc.
I discovered that if you mount the virtual harddrive on a IDE interface rather than SATA it installs in 10mins from ISO file.
But it is now too slow…
So installed windows 8 to a VHD file to use native hardware:
http://blog.concurrency.com/infrastructure/dual-boot-windows-8-from-vhd-using-windows-setup/
You don’t need Daemon Tools. You can just use Virtualbox’s virtual drive.
I don’t like so much the user interface squared corners, it’s like an old Windows. I hope it’s not the definitive theme to the OS.