»Qemu is a great new piece of software that allows emulation of an operating system (several of them, including windows) from a host operating system. This is useful for running pesky apps that only work on windows (or other) operating systems.

Installation and configuration

the qemu »homepage discusses installation on many platforms, which isn't hard. Configuration is a little tricky. This example describes the setup of windows 2000 (guest os) on a linux machine (host os) with Qemu v 0.60.

Once Qemu is installed, make a file image that will be the "c drive" of the windows install. Do this quickly with dd ('of' is the filename, 'seek' is the filesize in KB):

dd of=qemu_image.img bs=1024 seek=4000000 count=0

With a windows 2000 (or other) install cd in the cd tray (doesn't have to be mounted), type the following (this will boot off the cd and prompt for install instructions):

qemu -hda qemu_image.img -cdrom /dev/cdrom -boot d -user-net

Once windows is installed (which takes 2-3 hours!) run this command to run Qemu and start up windows:

qemu -hda qemu_image.img -boot c -user-net

Or if you want to use the cd:

qemu -hda qemu_image.img -boot c -user-net -cdrom /dev/cdrom

Word 2000 seems to run very well on this setup, running on a 1.8 gigahertz machine. But it is still quite slow, dont expect to migrate seismic sections with this setup! Also the net connection works but is very slow.

Transfering files: the net connection works with this method, but is VERY slow. Samba and smb can be used to transfer files between the guest and host os, but this will only work in version 0.61 or greater (will update this part later).