kallasoft

Virtualization has always held a special place in my toolset because it allows me to make modifications to my environment without the headache of potentially breaking something. So, any improvements on this front tend to grab my attention.

Recently, I came across AQEMU a GUI frontend to QEMU. For those of you who may not know, QEMU is an Open Source command line application that has support for CPU and System emulation. Now when it comes to virtualization I am a big fan of Virtualbox and VMplayer because of their straightforward GUIs and speed of setup. So, that being said, one of the things that has always turned me off from QEMU was the lack of a decent frontend. AQEMU has given me new hope, and with an interface similar to Virtualbox I find myself up and running AQEMU with very little headache.

Of course the greatest benefit of running QEMU is the fact that architectures other than x86 are slowly being added to the support list. In other words, you can emulate an old PowerPC or SPARC system on a more readily available x86 using QEMU. For those brave developers needing to develop cross architecture applications, this is just one more tool to make their lives easier. If you know all the dirt on what processor you need to run, AQEMU’s sleek interface allows you to setup that configuration quickly and easily.

Adding a new VM for the standard x86 System emulation is also easy:  click the Plus sign, give the VM a name, then specify your hard drive images in the HDD tab or cdrom iso in the CD/DVD/Floppy tab, and hit the play button.  To get up and running with AQEMU you will need to install QEMU and grab the AQEMU package from here. If you are running Ubuntu you can just grab the .deb package and then issue these commands in a terminal to install:

~$ sudo apt-get install qemu
~$ sudo dpkg -i aqemu-0.6.deb

When you first startup the application it will ask you to set up your configuration:

If you don’t need any special features, or if you just want to get running, click okay and the default settings will be applied. After that you should be good to go! Check it out and let us know what you think.