On 4/20/05, Kenji Okamoto <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Would you please give us your more detailed experience with Windows > version qemu? Is it easy to install them, how much of diskspace is > neccessary etc.
QEMU has only a handful of necessary files, and they're all relatively small: -rw-r----- 1 jack jack 305152 Feb 23 14:58 SDL.dll -rw-r----- 1 jack jack 65536 Feb 23 14:58 bios.bin -rw-r----- 1 jack jack 781824 Feb 23 14:58 qemu.exe -rw-r----- 1 jack jack 32768 Feb 23 14:58 vgabios-cirrus.bin -rw-r----- 1 jack jack 32768 Feb 23 14:58 vgabios.bin These are all from the latest ReactOS version, which (zipped) weighs in at around 10MB, because it includes a batch file and a pre-configured disk image. For my brief test, I just downloaded the latest Plan 9 ISO, uncompressed it in the QEMU folder and changed the batch file to: qemu -cdrom plan9.iso -boot d -m 54 -enable-audio -L . c.img To be honest, I can't recall what the -L option does and I didn't test the audio, and 54 MB of RAM is a little lean, but it was easily enough to boot. I've found that QEMU often errors out if the guest OS isn't given a hard drive image, possibly from drive probe failure, but the drive size does not need to be large if you'll be running live from CD or floppy. I have found that what should be the easiest part -- creating a file for the drive -- is not always easy under Windows, and often find myself resorting to the Cygwin tools to accomplish this. I should probably try 9pm. I prefer using QEMU under Linux, if only to get direct access to an entire drive (by using /dev/hdx as the C drive target) and because you can configure a virtual network adapter to have a server running in the virtual machine. I have found some guest OSes have trouble determining the drive geometry under QEMU and you end up having to do something like 'qemu -hdachs 8367,16,63 c.img' to get everything working. They also seem to tweak the command line options from version to version, so you may find other options that either change or improve behavior under Windows. On my machine at work Plan 9 booted surprisingly fast. If you know of a handy benchmark, I'd be happy to try it out and post the results. On the flip side, I know we often talk/joke about porting Web browsers, etc. to Plan 9 and I wonder if it wouldn't be easier to port QEMU and then run something like Windows XP Embedded (if it's supported) or Linux in a VM for those few apps you can't live without (or port). For me, that app is currently the Citrix client, so I'm stuck with some officially supported OS for a while (or do the VNC hop like everyone else does). Charon supports Gmail now, so I'm getting closer.... -Jack
