Qemu

2005 May 21 at 10:33 » Tagged as :virtualization, lame,

Just downloaded 0.7.0 of qemu. Looks like there have been two releases since the last time I tried it out. Improvements include a step towards Mac OS X support.

Last time around I didn't have much success with it partly due to a lack of patience on my part. The documentation being very cryptic didn't help either. This time around, I found that there is a running commentary on qemu on varius sites and more importantly answers!

So unlike the last time around I had more success in installing the guest operating system. This is the command I used at first:

qemu -boot d -cdrom /dev/hdc -hda hd.img

Unfortunately it turned out to be painfully slow. So I tried copying the entire CD into memory

dd if=/dev/hdc of=/dev/shm/boot.img

Of course you need to have a lot of memory if you take this approach, it only lead to a small increase in speed, but it was enough. Once the installation was completed, this is how I boot the system:

qemu -boot c -hda hd.img

Now I feel like ordering a copy of OS X Tiger and trying that out as the guest system.