Mark Knecht wrote:
> Interesting, but I wonder whether a guitar player / chip designer type
> guy could set it up? Spartanic is not generally a good environment for
> the likes of us.

Qemu at the moment is a command-line app, with the graphical output in a 
window, though I believe to have heard of gui frontends but never 
actually used one.  VMWare has a graphical configuration and some extra 
convenience features that make it somewhat easier to use (e.g. bridged 
networking is a lot easier to set up and the VMware tools for windows 
have some nice extra features).  In time, these convenience features 
will probably be incorporated into qemu, too.  I don't know about 
Parallels, never tried it.

I would suggest trying out the trial versions of VMware and Parallels to 
see if you want to pay for them.  As to qemu, the qemu documentation [1] 
and user forums [2] will probably have some useful info.  There is also 
a nice repository of free os images that are ready to use [3].

> The web page say this module is closed source. If that's the case then
> why qemu vs. VMware vs. Parallels?

Well kqemu is gratis, and if you insist on free you can use qvm86, 
though that might be less tested.  As a kernel module can always take 
down your machine, i prefer the one a lot of people test -- i'm lazy :) 
  I don't know the history as to why kqemu is closed source (all of the 
author's other projects are open-source), but i'm hopeful that will change.

> Thanks. It's very intersting. How does this compare to BOCHS?

To my knowledge bochs is a lot slower than qemu even without kqemu. 
I've never tried it myself though as i've always been happy with qemu, 
so that might all be lies :)

Wikipedia has a nice page comparing emulation/virtualization/... 
solutions [4].

Marco

[1] http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/user-doc.html
[2] http://qemu.dad-answers.com/
[3] http://free.oszoo.org/
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_virtual_machines
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