Bochs User Manual
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# Chapter 4. Setup

# What does Bochs need?

These are the minimum requirements for running an OS inside of Bochs:

    - the bochs executable
    - the bios image (usually called 'BIOS-bochs-latest')
    - the vga bios image (e.g. 'VGABIOS-lgpl-latest')
    - at least one bootable disk image (floppy, harddisk or cdrom)

In that case you have to pass the configuration options on the command line or to use the configuration interface to set up Bochs for the simulation. Running Bochs is easier if you use a configuration file (we call it 'bochsrc'). See section bochsrc for all supported options.

If your keyboard output inside of Bochs is wrong, you may also need a keymap file to remap your keyboard layout to the U.S. layout. A set of keymap files for the X window system and SDL (Linux port) is distributed with Bochs. If your keyboard layout is not supported yet, you should have a look at the section How to write your own keymap table.

A collection of disk images of different operating systems can be found at http://bochs.sourceforge.net/diskimages.html. Some disk images are the size of a floppy disk (1 meg compressed) and others are gigantic (160 meg compressed). If you want to create a disk image yourself, please see the section How to make a disk image.

This should be completed

      - (DONE )bochsrc, BIOS, VGABIOS, disk images.
      - (DONE) table of bochsrc options and what they do
      - BIOS/VGABIOS, what do they do?
      - disk images
        - (DONE) where to find one pre-made
        - (DONE) make a blank one with bximage
        - grab one from a real hard disk

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Installing the VGA font (X windows only) |  | bochsrc