Re: [9fans] slightly ot: how can I get vmware 4.5?

[Jack Johnson <knapjack@gmail.com>]

On 4/20/05, Kenji Okamoto <okamoto@granite.cias.osakafu-u.ac.jp> wrote:
> Would you please give us your more detailed experience with Windows
> version qemu?   Is it easy to install them, how much of diskspace is
> neccessary etc.

QEMU has only a handful of necessary files, and they're all relatively small:

-rw-r-----    1 jack     jack       305152 Feb 23 14:58 SDL.dll
-rw-r-----    1 jack     jack        65536 Feb 23 14:58 bios.bin
-rw-r-----    1 jack     jack       781824 Feb 23 14:58 qemu.exe
-rw-r-----    1 jack     jack        32768 Feb 23 14:58 vgabios-cirrus.bin
-rw-r-----    1 jack     jack        32768 Feb 23 14:58 vgabios.bin

These are all from the latest ReactOS version, which (zipped) weighs
in at around 10MB, because it includes a batch file and a
pre-configured disk image.

For my brief test, I just downloaded the latest Plan 9 ISO,
uncompressed it in the QEMU folder and changed the batch file to:

qemu -cdrom plan9.iso -boot d -m 54 -enable-audio -L . c.img

To be honest, I can't recall what the -L option does and I didn't test
the audio, and 54 MB of RAM is a little lean, but it was easily enough
to boot.  I've found that QEMU often errors out if the guest OS isn't
given a hard drive image, possibly from drive probe failure, but the
drive size does not need to be large if you'll be running live from CD
or floppy.

I have found that what should be the easiest part -- creating a file
for the drive -- is not always easy under Windows, and often find
myself resorting to the Cygwin tools to accomplish this.  I should
probably try 9pm.

I prefer using QEMU under Linux, if only to get direct access to an
entire drive (by using /dev/hdx as the C drive target) and because you
can configure a virtual network adapter to have a server running in
the virtual machine.  I have found some guest OSes have trouble
determining the drive geometry under QEMU and you end up having to do
something like 'qemu -hdachs 8367,16,63 c.img' to get everything
working.  They also seem to tweak the command line options from
version to version, so you may find other options that either change
or improve behavior under Windows.

On my machine at work Plan 9 booted surprisingly fast.  If you know of
a handy benchmark, I'd be happy to try it out and post the results.

On the flip side, I know we often talk/joke about porting Web
browsers, etc. to Plan 9 and I wonder if it wouldn't be easier to port
QEMU and then run something like Windows XP Embedded (if it's
supported) or Linux in a VM for those few apps you can't live without
(or port).  For me, that app is currently the Citrix client, so I'm
stuck with some officially supported OS for a while (or do the VNC hop
like everyone else does).

Charon supports Gmail now, so I'm getting closer....

-Jack