Minecraft Bedrock on a VM under Slackware Linux

STATUS: ABANDONED! Sadly, this turned out to be a misadventure that was just far too much work. I had an old, low-power laptop that it turns out can run Windows 10 and Minecraft Bedrock just fine, so I took the easy way out and did that instead.

This document does contain at least some instructions for parts of getting SPICE running on the host and guest. But I ended up with an unstable Windows guest that crashed on me. :-(

Okay, here’s the adventure:

In my previous "episode", I had great success with QEMU/KVM and virt-manager.

Now I’m going to try to get Minecraft Bedrock working under a Windows 10 VM.

Archive.org also has a non-LTSB version of Windows 10 available, which does have the Microsoft Store. I used the same procedure to install the ISO. The only weird part was that it auto-detected the ISO as "Windows 11", so I had to manually change it to "Windows 10".

Here’s the ISO I used:

https://archive.org/details/windows10iso_202301

The installation went fine. I used my old Windows 7 Professional license key (purchased on DVD in a physical store!) and that worked no problem. I will give Microsoft this: they are very good about allowing old keys for Windows.

Then I was able to log into the Microsoft Store and it knew I owned Minecraft (which I purchased when it was just the Java "edition" from Mojang back in the day). And to my amazement, it worked!

I can actually play a stuttering Minecraft Bedrock with my kids. The controls are completely messed up, so that’ll be the next thing to get working.

https://www.spice-space.org/download.html#windows-binaries

Installed the spice-guest-tools-latest.exe. Seemed to install with no problem, but didn’t otherwise notice any change. Rebooted Windows. Cursor still lagging (I see Windows cursor underneath X11 cursor and there’s a slight delay between the two).

Also, SPICE on the guest should enable copy-paste. And that’s not working either. Time to learn more about setting this up.

Okay, here’s

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/7/html/virtualization_deployment_and_administration_guide/sect-spice_agent

From "Procedure 11.6. Setting up communication between the SPICE agent and host with virt-manager":

Specifically, what I had:

Sadly, this produces the error:

According to Arch forum lore, I just need to add a Spice Graphics device.

So that goes like this:

Okay, now I’ve got:

LOL, so now I know I needed to install the spice package before compiling QEMU.

I’ll need to convert this "adventure" format into a summary on the QEMU page. But that can wait until I’ve got everything figured out…​

slackbuild:

https://slackbuilds.org/repository/15.0/network/spice/

Then I re-compiled QEMU (the slackbuild automatically picked up the optional dependency).

Now the above Graphics device worked followed by the Channel.

The relevant XML portions:

<graphics type="spice">
  <listen type="none"/>
  <image compression="off"/>
  <gl enable="no"/>
</graphics>

<channel type="spicevmc">
  <target type="virtio" name="com.redhat.spice.0"/>
  <address type="virtio-serial" controller="0" bus="0" port="1"/>
</channel>

Hmmm…​ I’m still seeing both cursors. So something else needs to be done.

SADLY it turns out that my Windows 10 installation ended up unstable at this point. Trying to open File Explorer froze the VM hard. And when I tried to restart it, it couldn’t get past Windows’s loading screen. I’d had enough and ended up just sacrificing some real hardware to Microsoft instead (as mentioned in the disclaimer at the top of this page).