Filed under: OS, Software, Universal Binary
Emulate Windows with Q
I just
downloaded and installed Q on my iMac Core Duo. I tried
importing my Windows 2000 Virtual PC 7 image from an old backup disk, and it imported, but keeps crashing at startup.
However, this discussion over at Accelerate Your Macintosh
has me hopeful that Q just may be the future of free Windows emulation on the Mac. According to the Q site, "Run
Windows, Linux and a lot more Systems on your Mac. Q is a feature packed cocoa port of QEMU: Switch fast between guest
PCs. Save and restart guest PCs at any stage. Easily exchange Files between Host and Guest. Q makes use of OS X most
advanced technologies like openGL and coreaudio to accelerate your experience with your guest PC."This program is still in development, but they have a Universal Binary. Later on today, when I have some free hours (ha!), I think I'll try to build an image from scratch and install XP. I'll report back after the weekend with my findings.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Joe said 12:02PM on 2-17-2006
i just did this last night! was never able to solve the crashing-on-import-old-VPC image issue, but DAMN is it fast! i installed win2K from scratch and it seems to be working just fine. as a matter of fact, since it runs the billing app i need windows for, its going to be a VERY hard sell to get me to shell out for a VPC upgrade
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Jharrisjamieh said 12:12PM on 2-17-2006
I tried it today, with no luck. Again, I can't get the import from VPC thing to work, and I keep running into different problems when trying to install both XP and 98. Gave up in the end, but would be pleased to hear from anyone who has got it working
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LD said 12:15PM on 2-17-2006
Q is just a front-end for Qemu. So "in development" is simply for the front-end. Qemu has worked for quite some time on PPC OS X.
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DoubleWah said 12:32PM on 2-17-2006
What's really needed is a port of the QEMU accelerator module. Once you've got that in place, then some stuff will run at native speed. It essentially runs most of the target code directly on the processor. This is possible because you actually do have an intel processor, so there's no need to emulate one! This is available for Linux, Windows and FreeBSD hosts... I really hope someone's working on this for the intel OS X .
Read more here: http://www.qemu.org/qemu-accel.html
Si
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Rhapsody said 1:05PM on 2-17-2006
I've install W2K from CD image directly and it install in less an hour on intel imac.
I am stuck at login windows of W2K, i can't type Crtl Alt Del, as Crtl-Alt get the mouse out of the virtual machine.
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Joe said 1:06PM on 2-17-2006
be sure to get the latest "unstable" ubinary from their site, and enable "win2k install hack" in the advanced options.
also, the win2k installer really didnt like recognizing a compressed drive image, it kept showing up as a zeroMB drive. so i had to make the first hard drive a 2G static image
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Joseph said 1:49PM on 2-17-2006
I've been using it for some time now running Win 98SE on my iBook G4. It runs pretty smoothly!
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MT said 2:22PM on 2-17-2006
So, I see this post on Q. I download Q. I've got an XP install disk. I've got a powerbook. I tried to follow the discussions/hacks/image files and all that elsewhere, but they seem confusing. Will Q guide me through the process if I put the XP disk in the drive and muddle through? Thanks!
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ZylogZ80 said 2:41PM on 2-17-2006
I installed Q and installed Win 2K. It's so slow it's useless. I tried it on my PowerBook 1.3ghz (1 gb ram) and my Mac Mini 1.5 ghz (.5 gb ram).
Maybe I did something wrong while setting it up?
Everything works fine, but it's soooooooo slow. It takes about 3 to 5 minutes to load FireFox, and moving a window around the screen is out of the question.
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Max v W said 3:44PM on 2-17-2006
I tried it on my iBook G4, with the only Windows CD i had left (2003 Server Enterprise Edition, student license). But they keyboard doesn't seem to work well with the installer, weird problem. But i downloaded the nightly so maybe it's just that. Anyhoo, my iBook does get a little hot after a long 'install' (still not finished)
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Ed said 4:11PM on 2-17-2006
Q is pretty unusable on a PPC Mac, but on an Intel Mac, it definitely quick, since it doesn't have to emulate anything. There are lots of bugs to be squashed still, but it looks to be a good alternative until VMWare or Microsoft get their act together.
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Bouland said 5:03PM on 2-17-2006
I guess I need a set of step-by-step instructions. I'm trying to install it on a G5-dual processor system. It hangs when trying to create a GuestPC from VPC7 and I haven't figured out how to install from my Win2000 and WinXP disks. Does QEMU have to be installed along with Q? Any help would be appreciated.
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Mark Fleser said 5:21PM on 2-17-2006
Can it be installed completely on a USB Fat32 formatted drive? I would kind of like to be able to do it just for the h#ll of it but I don't have the internal HD space to do it.
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chadseld said 8:39PM on 2-17-2006
As I understand it, Q is still emulating an x86 not virtualizing one. There is another component to QEMU which enables virtualization, but it is not finished for intel macs yet. So, if Q is already quick on intel macs, hold on to you hat because it is going to get a lot quicker over the next few months.
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icerabbit said 9:28PM on 2-17-2006
#12. Doing the same here on DP G5. Insert your installation disk. Create you Guest PC. Select Boot From CD and you'll be good to go.
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Bouland said 1:14AM on 2-18-2006
icerabbit: still didn't work. Selected Boot from CD-ROM but no installation occured. I'm using the Win 2000 install disk. Any other ideas?
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C.K. Sample, III said 9:57AM on 2-18-2006
Depending upon your 2000 disk (some are not bootable except via a floppy boot disk) you may have to create a floppy boot image to start the whole process. wheeeeeeee windoze is fun!
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icerabbit said 5:11PM on 2-18-2006
No immediate other ideas, as I wouldn't know how you create a Win floppy image on a recent Mac without floppy drive. Through the network?
Did spot that you can import VPC images via the tools menu. Not sure if that might help, if you had a boot floppy image in VPC?
--> Does somebody know where the Q harddisks for the virtual machines are located? I created a 2GB one for XP, but it runs reeaaalllyyyy slow on DP G5 2.5 w 2.5 GB RAM. I wish to delete that disk image ... but can't find it on my system and of course neither does spotlight.
Feedback to developers:
Overal I'm pretty impressed with the ease of use etc.
Few points I want to bring up:
- Recognition of USB keyboards plugged into the monitor hub? Apple's keyboard cords are too short to plug into my machine under my desk ... so I can't keep my keyboard on my desk when using Q.
- Screen size larger then 800x600?
- Please do not use CTRL + ALT to release the mouse. As noted earlier here, it prevents from using CTRL + ALT + DEL and thus functionality you can quickly reach that way
- I have redraw issues where Window boxes first appear as being filled with ~~~~ then later they may switch to regular grey ... or not.
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icerabbit said 5:16PM on 2-18-2006
Doh. Found it.
It is located in the Documents folder under QEMU and gets the custom name of the guest pc with .qvm extension. Not Harddisk_1.qvoc. ( And at 850MB it skipped spotlight, 2 days, >1GB. )
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macinbot said 11:50AM on 2-20-2006
I am stuck at login windows of W2K, i can't type Crtl Alt Del, as Crtl-Alt get the mouse out of the virtual machine.
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You can't press Ctrl-Alt-Del as the Alt key is in a different position on a PC keyboard. It is the one next to the spacebar (Command) which acts as the Alt key on Windows. If you press Alt (Option), it is the equivalent of pressing the Windows key on a PC keyboard, which merely displays the Start menu (when logged in).
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