Blackpool Linux User Group

Qemu comes in from the cold.

Several years ago I saw a USB stick plugged into a windows machine, and Linux started in a window on the desktop.
This was Qemu. It was impressive, but too slow to be considered for serious use.

Fast forward to todays powerful hardware, and it is now usable.
I have seen a very broad generalisation which indicates that Qemu runs at about 20% native speed.
http://www.impactlinux.com/fwl/presentation.html (Long document, search for 20%)
That does not sound like a lot, but if you have 20% of a dual or quad core, that is likely to be more power than windows98 had in it's day.

Today we demonstrated a USB stick which could be plugged into a machine running windows or linux, and then started windows98 in Qemu on either desktop.
Windows98 performed at good speed with no 'stutters', on a dual core Dell inspiron 530.

Les had brought in his O2 Joggler again. We booted it into Ubuntu from a USB stick, then ran windows98 in Qemu on this as well.
Les took some pictures of this in action, and may post them later.

There are some reports on the web of people running windows3.1 in Qemu on an iphone!
http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/03/02/that-n95-running-windows-31-pft-che...

Qemu is most certainly 'on the up'.

I installed the RC onto my test bed laptop yesterday. The new install procedure looks good, on first boot from the DC you get a choice to run in live mode or go strait to install but its a nice new GUI from the get go. Install options are the same as 9.10. Once you have chosen your region, keyboard and decided on if you want to install on the whole disc or not you get prompted to choose a user name and password and if you want to boot to desktop without needing password or not. You also have the choice to encrypt your home directory which is good if its a portable PC. The actual install took about 25 minutes which wasn't to bad. Given that this was the RC and had only been out a couple of days there was a lot of updates to the software which took another 20-30 minutes to install once the base system was in place.

It seems slick and quite fast but not yet ready for work use as it will not recognise my 3G dongle, this seems to be a known bug going back to 9.10 which seems to have still not been resolved, not good for the new LTS release and as it's not an issue in Mint 8 (based on 9.10) why is it still an issue here? Boot time is acceptable for the hard ware and everything else seems to work fine, all the PC hardware was recognised out of the box, but as I put it on a Dell I1300, and considering all the work Ubuntu and Dell have done together I would expect nothing else. It also recognised my WiFi? dongle without any problems. It downloaded the codecs for MP3, Flash and DVD as needed and all are working. It also shuts down very quickly. One small thing is that the Max, min and close buttons on windows are now on the upper left hand side (Mac like) it can be a bit confusing at first and I think I would want to change this back to what I'm used to.

If it was not for the 3G issue I would say it was ready for day to day use on a second PC, but I wouldn't chance it as my day to day works PC until I was sure there were no more bugs lurking in the background. It will also be interesting to see how others fare on different hardware and different peripherals. I think I will wait for Mint 9 to come out and let them sort out the bugs before I install it to my working PC.

Tony1212

Update on the distribution release. I've just installed it to my Acer Aspire 1 Net Book and the 3G dongle now works fine. This was the desktop edition and I'm impressed as it is running very slick. It's using about 160M of memory at rest which for the full Gnome desktop is impressive. I will install on the Dell when I get it back, as I have lent it to someone while I fix their Toshiba which is full of spy-ware and viruses (Windows XP say no more)

Further Update, I got the Dell back and installed the DR and what happens I can't get the 3G Dongle to work. As it works with the ACER it's not a problem with Lucid that's now obvious so all I can think is it's a hardware problem with the USB ports, but as they seem to be working with my WiFi? Dongle I'm not sure what it could be :-( I think I'll try the forums

I've just realized that when I had Mint 8 on this laptop the 3G was working OK so I'm now sure it's not the just the hardware, there must be some sort of conflict within the install for this PC. I'll stick to my original idea and look at Mint 9 when it comes out and see if that resolves the issue.

Tony1212