[LAU] Linux/Windows dichotomy

[Niels Mayer]

After recent successes (
http://lists.linuxaudio.org/pipermail/linux-audio-dev/2010-October/029552.html
http://nielsmayer.com/meego/meego-handset-ia32-1.0.80.9.20100706.1-sdk-pre0901.png
) getting meego running under Fedora using http://www.linux-kvm.org/
and  http://www.qemu.org/  I was looking up how to solve the
networking/routing issue when I found this:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WindowsXPUnderQemuHowTo

Which inspired me to try it out...  following these directions, e.g.

gnulem-105-~/windows-qemu> qemu-img create -f qcow windows.img 6G
Formatting 'windows.img', fmt=qcow size=6442450944 encryption=off
gnulem-109-~/windows-qemu> qemu -localtime -cdrom /dev/dvd -m 1024
-boot d windows.img

results in an ever-growing file

-rw-r--r-- 1 npm npm 632M 2010-10-27 18:50 windows.img

And a reminder of why i hate windows -- installs take forever and
require multiple reboots:

http://nielsmayer.com/meego/loading-win-xp-in-qemu.png
http://nielsmayer.com/meego/setup-win-xp-in-qemu.png
http://nielsmayer.com/meego/still-installing-win-xp-after-reboot-1.png

... and hopefully, eventually, in a few hours (the "36 minutes" from
the installer is bogus) I'll have my own legal copy of win xp running
on linux (from an old system restoration disk i had from an old and no
longer working laptop).... of course, to be able to use windows,
without puking all over the DOS shell, I'll have to install cygwin.
Which is pretty perverse: Running windows in a kvm so you can have
xemacs, bash, xterms from windows on linux.....  It would be
interesting to see how well Windows audio production programs run
using this technique instead of Wine.

A few more interesting links...

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SeamlessVirtualization
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=2062234#post2062234
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/KVM
http://compsoc.dur.ac.uk/~djw/qemu.html

-- Niels
http://nielsmayer.com