Klistvud wrote:
Dne, 04. 08. 2009 07:48:50 je jeremy jozwik napisal(a):hello list. the wife wants to watch netflix "watch instantly" videos. it requires a program to be installed in order to watch the videos. said program is only supported under the w and mac os. so i figured this would be a nice time to setup a virtual machine. so ive been poking around with qemu. so far i have a windows machine running but its is massively slow. loading up an IE window takes for ever. i know there is some crazy emulation voodoo going on but is there anything i can do to speed it up? also it has not audio! step by step that i used to setup the machine http://www.debian-administration.org/article/ Running_Microsoft_Windows_inside_Debian_qemu
As already said by Tzafrir, your best bet is to use kvm if your CPU supports it, otherwise opt for kqemu at least. Qemu all by itself is terribly slow, although it's a magnificient, stable piece of software. As for sound ... I could never make it work in Debian either, but IIRC it did work in openSuSE when I tried (and possibly in some other distros). Maybe it's down to package versions. Using a more recent version of qemu might just do the trick ... or not ...If you're on Lenny, the package versions tend to be somewhat oldish.
I would add that there is now a huge amount of virtualization available, if qemu is not satisfactory, consider another choice. Best is a machine with a multiple-core CPU and hardware support for virtualization, but at any rate, you have several choices.
If you don't mind some work (and your hardware supports it), try Xen. It is a little daunting to set up, but it is good not only for running something like windows side-by-side with Debian, but it would also be good to allow you to try out other interesting os'es and such. Running a Xen kernel, you could run Lenny and Sid as separate vm's (dom's) at the same time.
VirtualBox-OSE is an application that you can install like qemu and run windows inside, and it is very easy to set up and use. It has very good hardware support, so audio probably wouldn't be a problem, it runs fast, and whatever guest OS you choose to run can easily be started and stopped at will.
Qemu works, but may not be your best option in Debian. If you want to stick with it, as others have pointed out, it might help to not try full virtualization, but use kernel virtualization with kvm.
Keep us posted. Mark Allums