Hi Amit, I'll try to answer your questions:
At this stage, QEMU is pretty slow, even with the latest kernel module (kqemu), but things are changing quite often. At this stage, the hardware emulation level is quite basic, and I have seen lots of weird things when running Windows 2k/XP as guest, so I wouldn't recommend it for day to day use. Bochs is quite worse - it's about 10 times slower then QEMU, so unless you want 2 DAYS to install XP - be my guest ;) For the moment - your only option is VMWare (or doing multi boot), but VMWare won't let you play any 3D games.. > 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. For games - you can always try WineX (which requires subscription payment for the full version). > * Can QEMU give the emulated windows drivers real (low level) access to > the CD? to a USB device? To CD - yes. to USB - not yet. > * 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? Probably. > * 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?) QEMU has AMD64 emulation support (it can emulate AMD64), but it's not finished yet. > * 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). Well, since you install XP on a virtual disk - the disk remains the same (more or less) so you won't have to have to activate it each time until you choose your best option - I think you have few days until you'll have to activate the XP.. > * 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? No, ReactOS DEFINATELY won't run any USB device yet, won't run any DirectX and forget about running most of the commercial apps/games on it. > * Is there a (legal) way to use a single license for a real and emulated > installations on the same PC? Nope, since the emulated machine is different from the real machine (different hardware is emulated by the hardware, compared what you have on your motherboard). > * 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? Nope. > thanks for any comments Hope this helps.. Hetz ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
