On 10/7/06, Claude Jones <claude_jones@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sat October 7 2006 4:35 pm, Arthur Pemberton wrote: > And here I thought runing WinXP Pro under Qemu ontop of FC5 on > my desktop was a big deal. Arthur: You caught my attention. I've run XP under VMWare player on FC5, but never tried Qemu. Can you give a short critique - what works, what doesn't, what you'd like to see - what kinds of things you do? --
Well I did it out of curiousity, saw Qemu mentioned on the list and gave it a try. It it _very_ easy to setup with very little pre-reading, I was able to put up to an WinXP Pro iso i had and install Windows without a hitch. I originally did not increase the user cpu frequency (I dobut that's the correct term) as qemu suggest. So installtion was slow. Also I gave it 256MB of memory initially. So setup took some time, not that a regular install of Windows XP is very fast. However, what I was most impressed about was that within the hosted Windows , there was no sign that anything was "strange". What I found impressive was that networking worked to the hosted Windows without me having to do anything: upon install I could immediately update windows and install firefox. Performace wise things were originally very slow. On my second use of the hosted Windows, I have it 512MB or ram, I had to increase the side of /dev/shm (qemu also told me how to do that), and I also increased the user cpu cycles as recommended by qemu: from 96 yo 1024 I believe. On my 2.8GHz machine, inside the hosted Windows felt like about 900MHz. I was personally impressed by this since I use KDE and normally have it under a lot of load: for example I have 12 virtual desktops. I am of the understanding that using a kernel module along with qemu drastically increases performance, however, I could not fidn the module in Extras of Livna, so I didn't tackle it just yet. So currently, I'm of the assumtion that I can comfortably use Photoshop 7 in a hosted WinXP image...when I get the drive and time, I will experiment further. The display also seemed to work pefectly: I set it to 1024, my Fedora was at 1280. One noteable problem however, was that it was suppose to have an emulated Sound Blaster 16 card, for reasons yet unsolved by me, the hosted Windows seemed not to pickup the card, so I had no sound in Windows - wasn't really a big deal however. The only thing I would like to see at this point is the qemu kernel module in a repo near me. Would make things even simpler. On a side note, I hadn't felt that safe in Windows since 3.1 Peace. -- Fedora Core 5 and proud
