QEMU / FreeOSZoo

February 16, 2005 3:27 PM

QEMU lets you run the OS of your choice inside your current OS. It really has to be seen to be believed. The FreeOSZoo provides a good introduction to QEMU.
posted by xowie (18 comments total)

It's slow, though... that's the only downside.

I recommend running Damn Small Linux with it... it's kinda rad, but more than a little quirky.
posted by ph00dz at 3:39 PM on February 16, 2005

I've had problems installing winXP on it . I can see how to fix the problems but for what I need it turns out to be easier to just go ahead and buy vmware which is faster and more reliable. The idea of doing jit to speed up an emulator is still pretty cool.
posted by rdr at 4:15 PM on February 16, 2005

I'm an idiot. But still, how do I get the .img out of all these .bz2 files? I want to run this software here at the lab.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 4:20 PM on February 16, 2005

Just for the record, I've been happy running DSL, Gnoppix, Slax and MEPIS with XP as the host.

Re speed: on my setup, QEMU seems slowest when booting and opening applications. I get around this by saving the machine state (savevm) with the target OS fully booted and some apps open.
posted by xowie at 4:31 PM on February 16, 2005

> But still, how do I get the .img out of all these .bz2 files?

tar jxf foo.tar.bz2 if it's a tarball, or bunzip2 foo.bz2. But I'm guessing I must be missing something...
posted by NewBornHippy at 4:48 PM on February 16, 2005

So what's wrong with using VMWare instead? I use it emulate a web/Mysql Server on my laptop if I am working on a project away from a good a connection. VMWARE
posted by countzen at 5:21 PM on February 16, 2005

run the OS of your choice

Not seeing OS X in any of these screenshots..
posted by rulethirty at 5:26 PM on February 16, 2005

KDE, Mandrake , ReactOS inside OS X.

OSX inside windows.

vmware's not free.
posted by xowie at 5:36 PM on February 16, 2005

Actually that last shot was PearPC, sorry.
posted by xowie at 5:41 PM on February 16, 2005

fwiw 7-zip can uncompress bzip (and a lot more, including rar and zip) on windows.
posted by mrg at 6:19 PM on February 16, 2005

CoLinux is Linux as a Windows service/daemon. Seems kinda neat, though there's some kinks to be worked out. (Such as the default config filename not matching the one that comes in the archive... took me like an hour to figure that out 'cause I thought it was networking-related, and the error messages are utterly uninformative...)
posted by arto at 7:35 PM on February 16, 2005

Part of the reason this differs from something like VMWare is that allows one to emulate different architectures. One could, for example, run a PowerPC binary on an x86 machine. VMWare is unable to do this because it doesn't emulate but rather sets up a virtual processing space in which the guest OS can run. Because there is no translation involved virtualization is much faster which might tip the tables in favor of VMWare when emulating x86 on x86. There does appear to be a module available for QEMU that would put it on par with VMWare.
posted by darksquirrel at 8:39 PM on February 16, 2005

qemu's project leader is Fabrice Bellard, also the founder of FFMpeg, the video streaming codec used by mplayer. According to the Wikipedia entry, Bellard discovered the fastest formula to calculate single digits of pi in binary representation. Impressive.
posted by Loudmax at 8:52 PM on February 16, 2005

With new hard drives at $60 a pop, why bother? If you need a second OS, dual boot on a dedicated drive...

posted by login at 10:32 PM on February 16, 2005

i second arto - CoLinux is the best way to run linux on windows by far.
posted by jba at 11:47 PM on February 16, 2005

Hmm - not really "OS of your choice", is it?
posted by Chunder at 1:34 AM on February 17, 2005

With new hard drives at $60 a pop, why bother? If you need a second OS, dual boot on a dedicated drive...

To run both at the same time. (Me, I use vmware.)
posted by mendel at 9:58 AM on February 17, 2005

>>To run both at the same time. (Me, I use vmware.)

ah. fair enough.

(curious though. What do you need concurrent instances of different operating systems for?)

posted by login at 9:50 PM on February 17, 2005