Beyond the Sky

As compare with qemu, vmware performance is much much better and its peripheral device support is slightly better. But a free version of vmplayer do not support virtual disk creation, it means you can only load the image (in vmdk format) given by others.

With qemu-img, you can create a blank disk image and install any OS on it as your wish. qemu-img is also allow you to convert the disk image from one to another, for example you can dd Damn Small Linux from USB flash disk to hardisk and convert it to vmdk.

Vmplayer need a configuration file (vmx) to load vmdk, you can find sample vmx for reference, google it and you will get it. It do exist vmx builder online for free where you can build vmx based on your input. Refers to http://www.skrodahl.net/easyvmx/tutorial.html The author does a good job, guilding through you from using qemu-img to create virtual disk till building your own vmx and start install your OSes. It provide virtual disk image with different size for download as well in case you have difficulties to create one.

As my case, I facing problem with creating vmdk using qemu-img, and lately i discovery the causes of my problem. I am using qemu-img to create vmdk image at my FAT partition which i suspect it leads the image created with defects. I try to create and convert disk images at other linux partition and it works fine.

If you facing performance issues at qemu, you may want to give vmware a try although it is not open source. Trust me, the performance is much much better than qemu with kqemu patch. You can realised the differents if you install gkrellm, try to aware of processors used.

To convert an existing disk image let say my winxp.img with qcow format (which is qemu default image format)

qemu-img -f qcow winxp.img -O vmdk winxp.vmdk

Then create vmx using builder online and double click on the vmx that have created, that's it. Here is another reference on how to install Win XP or 2000 for vmplayer under ubuntu.

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=84275

To install Windows XP on Qemu, firstly i have to create an image as a container.

 qemu-img create -f qcow xp.img 5G

Next, insert WIN XP SETUP CD, and boot up qemu with cdrom

 qemu -boot d /dev/cdrom -hda xp.img

Now, install windows as usual, its slow ....

Something about KQEMU
When i restart my laptop, kqemu is gone, i need to modprobe kqemu again. Some how it do not works with me if I just modprobe kqemu, so i need to run the script 'install' or 'install.sh' under kqemu folder. Instead, I copy kqemu.ko and install.sh to the folder where i store all my image files. I append 'modprobe kqemu' to the install.sh and rename it as 'kqemu', so next time i may just run it with command line 'sudo sh kqemu'.

echo 'modprobe kqemu' >> install.sh
mv install.sh kqemu
chmod 755 kqemu

Ok, come back to windows installation, emm... almost done. For the first time booting up, it hangs. Its ok, restart it.

qemu -hda -localtime -soundhw es1370 xp.img

It load up smoothly and fast. I am able to connect to the internet. The first things i do, i download firefox.

Enlarge the image, you will see, my qwindows gateway is 10.0.2.2 and ip is 10.0.2.15. That is the default of qemu setup for you. You able to access to your parent OS, (for me, it is ubuntu), if samba is properly setup, just type in \\10.0.2.2 at windows exporer.

I have install 2 large programs just to try out, photoshop 8 and a game "feeding fency". Photoshop 8 failed to load up and "feeding fency" runs too fast. Its a bit disappointing, but i am still happy with QEMU. When i press CTRL + ALT + F, it gets to fullscreen and looks exacally the same like you actually loading up Windows XP.

Next, i try to load live cd iso image. ELive, nice distro to try out. Check out
geek00L's blog, it gives a good intro of this distro. Loading speed is slow, coz E 16 and E 17 uses a lots of processing power on its graphics animation.



So far, i am quite happy with QEMU, will try xen and vmware some other day.