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.
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
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
Now that the kqemu module is GPL, I don’t see a reason why the compilation of the module should be done by the user. Ubuntu (or some third party) could provide binary packages of kqemu for the Feisty kernels.
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.
Great idea, but maybe you should link to the tutorial about the “seamless” part. It’s found right here:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SeamlessVirtualization
And, I’ve been wondering what sort of impact qemu+kqemu has on a) performance vs VMWare and native, and b) battery life
Edited 2007-03-21 17:51
ad a)on decent hardware (with enough ram – 512MB is real minimum) you won’t see a difference in speed in applications like office, IE, outlook or something with equal system requirements. Anyway, native is always fastest and i think vmware is slightly faster than qemu+kqemu but not much.
ad b) higher CPU and HDD usage -> shorter battery life
but it is impossible to tell how much shorter it will be, because it also depends on applications running in virtual machine
> Anyway, native is always fastest and i think vmware is
> slightly faster than qemu+kqemu but not much.
Depends. CPU/memory performance is roughly comparable, but VMware is *way* better at screen performance. See http://forums.bsdnexus.com/viewtopic.php?id=1580 for some tests I did.
Caveat: this is on FreeBSD, and uses Win4BSD (based on qemu/kqemu) and a very old version of VMware. I would think the general result holds.
> i think vmware is slightly faster than qemu+kqemu but
> not much.
VMWare is faster but most of the *perceived* performance benefit’s over Qemu with the kernel accelerator module (and -kernel-kqemu) are due (in the case of Windows gusts atleast) to the guest side VGA and mouse drivers (bundled with VMWare Tools) which make the guest UI far more responsive and smooth. Qemu on the other hand opts to emulate real world hardware and your guest will use real world drivers.
Very, very cool thing. However, I fear that a casual user would meet another stumbling block.
Basically: if I want to open an Office document in seamless mode with MS Office, how do I load from/save on my /home directory by default? How do I seamlessly share files between the VM and the host?
Don’t get me wrong -I know that you can share data by using, for example, SMB, or an USB drive (with vmware at least, last time I checked USB support in qemu was quite rudimental). But this is not great for seamless usability (that is, if I want to do such a setup for my parents trying to bundle the windows applications they use more/need more, this wouldn’t work well).
Is it possible to build some kind of Windows script that automagically makes of “Documents and settings” a symlink to host /home (connected by SMB)?
In the loosely related case of rdesktop deployment on some organization (I think it would make much sense to have a single Windows box and license to run needed Windows apps that everyone can connect to), it is possible to have a client/server thing that automatically assigns the Documents and Settings to the home of the user connecting? I think yes, I’d like to know if someone did it.
I found it a lot easier to run applications such as Internet Explorer or Photoshop on PC-BSD, you just have to double-click the application wizard, click “Next” all the way, double-click the Photoshop icon and bang! Photoshop pops up, no headache, it just works
I’m guessing PC-BSD has Wine installed by default. I’d like to note that Wine is OK for some apps, but is still a relatively flaky emulator.
No, PC-BSD doesn’t come with WINE, but the software packages come with a copy of WINE, preconfigured and tested.
Don’t understand what you are saying. Are you saying that PC-BSD distributes Photoshop? I’d love to see what Adobe thinks about it.
I googled a bit and I found plain nothing about PC-BSD and Wine working in such a way. Could you please provide a link where it is explained what you mean? Such a feature won’t pass unnoticed.
I’d say they’re talking about:
http://www.pbidir.com/packages.php?code=508
Looks like it’s the full version bundled together with WINE but you naturally have to enter your legit product key.
Which version of Photoshop? Work reasonably well?
I’m assuming this still doesn’t support 3D acceleration? I could seriously enjoy linux this way if I could only play all my games.
Wine is the way to go for this – I use Crossover Office to play half-life under Linux. You need a well-supported video card with some muscle – a good nvidia 256MB comes to mind.
I have wine / cedega / crossover. Also have NV 7600 w 256. Linux plays a few games, but it doesn’t the things I almost always want. Mostly at this point in time it’s BF2142. I cancelled my cedega subscription because WoW and pornographic games are supported month after month, yet games like the battlefield series will get voted to the dev’s with no response.
Anyways, this isn’t about those other products..
I still see this being a viable option for gaming when VMware gets there 3D stuff cleaned up. Progress so far has been pretty amazing.
Saying bad things about Windows = trolling.
Saying bad things about Linux = giving your opinion.
The internet gave birth to an entirely new species of humans: web warriors and internet soldiers.
Saying bad things about Windows = trolling.
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I just played around with this a little, (using a remote machine) and found that if you run explorer.exe you get a nice fullscreen Windows desktop with Beryl effects
It’s not exactly perfect, eg. you have to move windows with alt+mouse1 for them to wobble, and everything is treated as a normal window in terms of animations, but it’s still quite fun to bring XP into the 21st century
I would love to be able to use this but I can’t use an application that pops up another window or I just get a black screen.
I tried outlook and when I tried to send an email, it died. Anyone have any ideas on fixing this?