Hi list,
I've ordered a new PC (AMD64 3000+ Socket939), and decided it's time to decrease the amount of those annoying reboots to windows by using an emulator.
I plan to use the emulator to run apps such as IE, maybe Office stuff (we need to share docs with other people, and many docs don't convert well to/from OpenOffice), and general testing (testing live-CD's etc.).
Note that I also have some windows apps (mainly games) which require the original CD, and even specialized hardware (Comfy keyboard) - I suspect I'll still need a genuine windows partition for these, at least until I find time to make them workable on Wine or the emulator.
I'd appreciate general recommendation about QEMU or other alternatives (Bochs?), but I also have some specific questions:
* Can QEMU give the emulated windows drivers real (low level) access to the CD? to a USB device?
* What would be the best way to share files between the guest OS and Linux - I think samba on the host could be good for sharing data on users' homes, but if I want to use windows dll's in Wine without having to start the emulation - must I duplicate them?
* What CPU should I emulate? (I think windows don't have 64 bit support anyway - do I need it to match the host CPU to enable acceleration? do I have a reason to select another CPU?)
* Windows "Activation" - I know that windows (I'll probably get a new winXP Home) hashes some system information when you activate it. Should I worry about future changes in the emulator which would cause this hash to change and force me to reactivate? (I think there's a 3 activations per license limit or something like that).
[Following part may be abit OT for this group - sorry for that...]
And about the true windows partition that I'll probably be forced to leave (as explained above),
I don't want to buy a seperate windows license for that, so:
* Do you think ReactOS would be good enough for these tasks (handle specialized USB Comfy Keyboard, run apps which test for original CD)? Does it support DirectX and accelerated graphics for games?
* Is there a (legal) way to use a single license for a real and emulated installations on the same PC?
* Maybe I would be better off using ReactOS on the emulation and real winXP on the partition? Does ReactOS have good enough (i.e. better than Wine's) support for hebrew and office?
thanks for any comments
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