Submitted by The Free Operating System Zoo provides ready-to-run disk images of free operating systems for use in the qemu processor emulator. Numerous Linux distributions, *BSDs, Darwin, Plan 9, and others are available. Nice for new users who want to try out other operating systems without installing them.
Free Operating System Zoo
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Adam Scheinberg
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Big plus for the author!
Agreed. Now here’s an awesome idea well-executed. Can’t wait for more images to be added.
Since this came up recently, another site
http://www.zabor.org/balrog/hurd/
offers qemu GNU/Hurd images so you can try it out.
It is a fairly well functioning Debian system, contrary to what people here seem to assume. Enjoy!
Until recently, I’ve never been particulary interested in emulation. At least not in such a low-level emulation.
But recently I got interested in security. Even though I’ve tried many Linux distro’s, Windowses, and FreeBSD, I know that there are OS’es out there from which I can learn. And this preconfigured emulation stuff seems just perfect to me.
I don’t really care about performance, since I do not want to actually do that much.
Now this is freaky. I was just playing with Qemu 0.8 to test a bartpe disk image. I decided to come to OSNews to take a break from it and see whats shaking, and they have an article about Qemu and OS Zoo. Coincidence? maybe
I’m off to OS Zoo to download some images.
Oops, forgot to mention one or two other things. If you use Qemu, you may want to give the Qemu Accelerator a try too. It will help speed up your sessions. Also, does anyone know if anyone will be making a Qemu 0.8 binary for Windows? I’d try it myself but I’m not a developer/programmer.
P.S. It may be just me, but Qemu 0.8 feels faster than 0.7.2
Edited 2006-01-28 15:30
what!? i thought free os zoo was gone because the guy that runs it didn’t like that the accelerator module wasn’t open sourced
From the downloadpage of
Freeos Zoo; http://free.oszoo.org/ftp/qemu/win32/daily/, daily build for Win32, last one is from 27/11 though, and several builds/patches here; http://www.h7.dion.ne.jp/~qemu-win/
0.8 feels faster indeed, but not by a very big margin as far as I can tell with a Windows XP virtual machine. I use the FreeBSD port and compiled it with kqemu and the hacks patch.
I’ve installed QNX 6.0 and QNX 6.3 each with 128 MB RAM and the 1 GB compressed drive image. They run about as fast as a 300MHz Pentium II on my dual 533 MHz G4.
Strike that, once I got QNX 6.3 running after the install it reported that it was running on a 33MHz Pentium II.
You could give the Windows XP on 8MHz a ru.., crawl for the money…