Virtualization of operating systems used to be slow and hard to use. Advances such as the KQemu accelerator, VirtualBox, VMWare, Xen and of course the recent integration of KVM virtualization into the Linux kernel have helped out a lot though, especially on the server side, but for a normal user, virtualization could be somewhat clunky. Mac users have been able to run their Windows applications like this using Parallels Coherence, yet now other *nix users can too. Ordinary desktop or business users who require applications from another operating system can benefit from a seamless desktop.
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Member since:2006-11-02
I'm pretty sure all but the last two lines are for compiling and setting up the KQEMU ("real" virtulization) module, and that's about as easy as it's gonna get until someone writes a pretty GUI to do it for you, or Ubuntu starts packaging and including kqemu.
Just my 0.03USD 
Member since:2006-01-29
Member since:2005-06-30
Yes, ordinary users need the type of functionality that this provides. That doesn't mean that an ordinary user is going to set it up.
I agree that there are a lot of things that should be easier to do in the software world, and this is a decent example. Unfortunately, most of the user friendly code isn't written until after the basic functionality is provided. This is based on recent software developments. You should expect continuing improvement if this is good enough for an appreciable number of people to use it and contribute to it.
Member since:
2006-01-20
cd /usr/src/linux
make-kpkg debian
make-kpkg modules_image
module-assistant prepare kqemu
dpkg -i /usr/src/kqemu-modules-''version''.dpkg
modprobe kqemu
qemu-img create -f qcow windows.img 2G
qemu -localtime -cdrom /dev/cdrom -m 384 -boot d windows.img
What about one of these:
http://emeitner.f2o.org/qemu_launcher
http://qemulator.createweb.de/
qemu_launcher is included in Debian (thus at least in "universe" in Ubuntu) and it's very straightforward to use.
Just my 0.02EUR.
Edited 2007-03-21 17:43