If you note that the comment page in my blog has been added with I use Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04) as an operating system. Getting VMWare Server to run on Ubuntu Feisty is a pain. There’s a reason I hate closed source software, on the whole it sucks.

What is Qemu? Qemu is an emulator. You can use qemu to install another operating system on your machine virtually. At this point, you don’t need multi-boot installation. With qemu, I can run FC6 inside my ubuntu box.

Ok. Lets get started. The easiest way to install qemu is to use apt-get. But it will give you an older version of qemu. I’ll show you how I manually install qemu with kqemu from the sources. In order to compile QEMU successfully, you’ll need Gnu C-Compiler (GCC) version 3.4. On most linux distribution GCC 4.x is not supported. You can usually use apt-get to install GCC 3.4 in Ubuntu.

sudo apt-get install gcc-3.4

You can get the latest version from the site, http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu. While I am writing this, the latest stable version is 0.9.0.

cd /tmp
wget http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/qemu-0.9.0.tar.gz
tar xzf qemu-0.9.0.tar.gz
cd qemu-0.9.0/

Then you configure Qemu and build it.

./configure --prefix=/usr --cc=gcc-3.4

If the configuration is complete, it will shows some output. Look at “kqemu support“. If it say Yes, then you can use kqemu module on your machine. Then, as root continue build and install it.

make
sudo make install

The Qemu is there for you to use. Typing qemu will shows some options. Now, lets continue with kqemu.

cd /tmp
wget http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/kqemu-1.3.0pre11.tar.gz
tar zxvf kqemu-1.3.0pre11.tar.gz
cd kqemu-1.3.0pre11
./configure
make
sudo make install

The device should be created with something like,

sudo modprobe kqemu major=0
sudo chmod +x /dev/kqemu
sudo chown root:admin /dev/kqemu

So, now you can run qemu with kqemu. Just use -kernel-kqemu option. Something like this:

qemu -hda fc6.img -boot c -cdrom /dev/cdrom -m 384 -kernel-kqemu

Hope you have learned something new here. Let me know if it doesn’t work for you. In the next post, I’ll show how to use qemu, creating an image file, and installing OS and etc.

Posted on May 3rd, 2007 by SMD
Filed under: Ubuntu