Anyone know qemu?

[Wiktor Grebla]

On Wed, 05 Jul 2006 21:40:58 +0100, Daniel Carrera wrote:

> Hello,

Hi Daniel. 

> Does anyone here know how to use qemu? I'd like to run Windows under
> Linux. I've been to the qemu website; their documentation is worthless.

It was quite useful for me, but...

> I'd be interested to know how one can create an image that contains a
> Windows installation (seems like a typical use case for qemu).

Ok, in a few words.

There are tools, namely qemu-img, and probably you should use them to
create your files, but you can simply use dd and create so called 
'raw-file' e.g:

dd if=/dev/zero of=./my_hd.raw bs=1024 count=2048000

(don't worry if it segfaults at the end, it's a known bug)

this will create 2GB file you can later use as your hda:

qemu -hda ./my_hd.raw -cdrom /dev/somwhere -boot d

it'll boot from a cd (you'll have to do dmesg | grep hd and check what's
the name of your cd, you can also use an iso file of your
installation cd). The raw-file behaves as an empty, unformatted hd, and
the rest of the setup process you should be fairly familliar with.

Unfortunately, there is one problem with qemu. It's slow :) You'll have to
compile it yourself with kqemu module enabled, which is a proprietary
thing, so it's not included in Ubuntu, and i bet you won't be happy
anyway. I'm sure there are tons of howtos on Ubuntu forums explaining how
to do it the right way. What I'd suggest to do, is to try vmware client.
It comes with Dapper nicely packaged, and it's performance is really
impressive[1] It's also quite easy to make an image, take a look at this
page:

http://www.ffnn.nl/pages/articles/linux/vmware-player-image-creation.php

Hope this helps.

Regards,
W.

[1] I've only tested it using parrotbench (python test), the difference
between Linux and Vmware was ~1.5%, so it's quite efficient.

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