System Emulator - Qemu

QEMU is a fast processor emulator, written by Fabrice Bellard, which allows full virtualization of a PC system within another one. It is free software. In particular, the QEMU virtual CPU core library is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (GNU LGPL). Many hardware device emulation sources are released under the BSD license. When running on Windows, the proprietary FMOD library is usually used, which disqualifies it for a single, unified, Open Source software license. QEMU is a hypervisor and is similar to projects such as Bochs, VMware Workstation and PearPC, but has several features these lack, including increased speed on x86 (through an optional accelerator), and support for multiple architectures in-progress. By using dynamic translation it achieves a reasonable speed while being easy to port on new host CPUs.

Qemu Launcher is a Gtk+ front-end for the QEMU, written by Erik Meitner and Linas Žvirblis. Qemu Launcher provides a graphical front-end to all basic, and many advanced QEMU computer emulator options. It allows you to create, save, and run multiple virtual machine configurations, create and convert disk images. Qemu Launcher utilizes the full system emulation mode of QEMU that allows you to run unmodified operating system on virtual hardware. Qemu Launcher also supports launching virtual machines from the command line, by specifying the configuration name. Note that you still need a graphical environment to do this, unless the virtual machine is set to start in non-graphics mode.

I like this program because it has Windows interface, and it can run VMware images. I tried to run Mac OS, but failed. But I am still using this program, interchangably with Bochs.

Rating: 3.8/5.0

QEMU on Windows
http://www.h7.dion.ne.jp/~qemu-win/



QEMU running on Debian Linux. Windows XP is running inside the virtual machine, which in turn is running Internet Explorer 6 displaying the Wikipedia front page.