Document Actions

Ubuntu under Qemu

About to start printing 25,000 Ubuntu installation copies of Ubuntu for distribution in developing countries. Family PC is on Ubuntu, and a lot of people also now on Ubuntu Breezy. In order to give better support, I need an accessible copy around, so I decided to give the FOSS QEMU emulator/virtual computer a go on my FreeBSD notebook.

QEMU

http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/

Installing QEMU is a snap on FreeBSD.

cd /usr/ports/emulators/qemu
make install clean

Next I needed to create a disk image (I love these).

qemu-img create ubuntu.img 4G

I don't think I saw examples in the docs. A quick google got me what I needed which was to boot and install from an iso file to the qemu virtual PC. I can't stress how important a few commonly used examples are. FreeBSD man pages almost always include them. After seeing examples, the command line options (which are well documented) become much easier to understand.

qemu -cdrom install.iso -hda ubuntu.img -boot d

And we're off...

Ubuntu Boot Up Screen

The initial boot up screen of Ubuntu 5.10 from CD.

Ubuntu LVM Install Screen

LVM installation. This is something, I'm interested in looking more into when I can find some time (hah!).
Installation takes forever (a few hours). My notebook's Pentium-M 1.4Ghz just doesn't have enough juice under emulation mode. Linux users (and FreeBSD support experimental) have access to a virtualization module which brings QEMU closer to VMWare and Xen in terms of performance. A faster machine say a Pentium 2.8Ghz or the fastest AMD CPUs would probably make emulation mode more usable.

Ubuntu Gnome under QEMU hosted by FreeBSD

Suprisingly, once the desktop is loaded it is quite usable. Only animated graphics is slow, but this may not hold true if using full screen mode. At this stage it is good enough for me to use synaptic and terminal to help troubleshoot. Though not fast enough to try other things yet. There are a lot more options such as networking and sound, and probably performance. Those will have to wait until the weekend I guess. Too much work to do this week.

Tuesday, October 11, 2005 in FOSS | FreeBSD | Permalink | Comments (3)