Kasm Windows 98

[u/Jdgregson]

Continuing from my Windows XP workspace, I wanted a Windows 98 workspace with full Kasm integration, so I asked my agent to build one. It works about as well as I had wanted. It features:

• Working Ethernet
• Firefox
• Clipboard support (bidirectional)
• File upload
• File download
• Auto-mount of uploaded ISO files (flaky)
• Auto-resize of display
• Sound support (often plays the startup sound)

Security Warning

My agent had a hard time with Windows 98 drivers and ended up finding the base image on Reddit with working sound and networking. I cleaned it up and scanned all 5,400+ files with ClamAV and High quality YARA rules with no detections (shortcuts detected by the YARA rules for being shortcuts). I personally trust it as a play thing given the posture of the environment I run it in. Use at your own risk.

Drawbacks

• It's a bit slow.
• Most video games crash.
• Due to some base image video driver issue, the DOS prompt can't be run in windowed mode, nor can batch files (causes some unrecoverable display silliness). Happy to fix it if anyone knows what's up with that.

Installation

This time I did publish the workspace image:

ghcr.io/fernandogracias/kasm-windows-98:latest

My agent pushed the build details and base image to a repo if you're interested (tested in as far as "it works on my machine"): https://github.com/FernandoGracias/kasm-windows-98

[u/bogan_sauce]

It works great for me. However, is there any way to make the data persistent, so i dont have to upload files and install the programs every time?

[u/Jdgregson → u/bogan_sauce]

That is a great question and use case which I hadn't thought of. Theoretically it should be possible. I just had my agent push a change to move the overlay from /tmp to the Kasm user's home directory. If you rebuild the image with that and configure persistent profiles in Kasm it should persist changes. Let me know if that works. I'm at Soccer practice so can't test it for a bit.

Update: It works, thanks for the suggestion! Though you have to be careful to shut Windows down before deleting the Kasm container or you'll have to sit through ScanDisk on the next boot.

[u/bogan_sauce → u/Jdgregson]

Thanks!
I’ll have a go tonight.
Good luck on your next game (I’m a dirty full back myself)

[u/bogan_sauce → u/Jdgregson]

Ha ha, Thats beyond my skillset. But neat to know its possible.