gentoo, ubuntu, qemu and oh my what a cute geek you are

pearls before swine never fails to crack me up




looking for an alternative for vmware player, i decided to give qemu a spin. qemu is an open source processor emulator, in short if you have qemu on your linux box, you can install say, windows or freebsd on it, and run those OSes on top of your linux. here are screenshots of ubuntu running on qemu on my gentoo notebook:


so far, i am very satisfied with qemu. here are the steps that are needed to install ubuntu on qemu on gentoo:

first enable kqemu USE flag:

echo "app-emulation/qemu-softmmu kqemu" >>/etc/portage/package.use

the kqemu use flags will the qemu accelator module. this module will enables the qemu emulator to run faster.

then add the following to your /etc/portage/package.keywords

app-emulation/qemu app-emulation/qemu-softmmu app-emulation/qemu-user app-emulation/kqemu

emerge qemu: emerge qemu

after qemu is installed, create a disk image named ubuntu510.img with a size of 5 jiggabyte:

qemu-img ubuntu510.img 5G

at this point you can start qemu using the image, and install ubuntu. however, the kqemu node needs to be created and the module loaded:

mknod /dev/kqemu c 250 0 chmod 666 /dev/kqemu modprobe kqemu major=0

and now we can start qemu with the following command:

qemu -hda ubuntu510.img -cdrom ubuntu-5.10-install-i386.iso -boot

this tell qemu to treat the recently created disk image as hda, and booting from cdrom using the ubuntu iso image. from here onwards, you will be greeted by the ubuntu installation screen.

the result was good. i managed to get ubuntu up and running (although the installation took a very long time) and managed to get xorg to run on the same resolution as the host. of course gnome (on ubuntu on qemu) is sluggish - maybe i should have configured the xorg at a lower resolution. nevertheless, it's working fine.

listening to: tool - Ã