The -m option specifies how much RAM this virtual machine will be given to use (in this case, I have allocated 512 MB of RAM your choice should be based on your needs and hardware). In the above command, the -hda option specifies the disk image file and -cdrom is the CD-ROM or ISO image to use as the “optical drive” for the VM. The next step is to install Ubuntu (I already have a downloaded Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) ISO image in my current working directory): $ qemu -hda ubuntu.img -boot d -cdrom. To create it, run the following commands: $ qemu-img create ubuntu.img 10G So let’s install the Ubuntu 9.10 OS in the VM a disk image of 10 GB is sufficient for this purpose. The first step is to create the hard disk image for the VM. If you are familiar with other virtualisation software, you might wonder how to go about creating a new VM. To confirm that QEMU has been successfully installed, run qemu, and a pop-up window like what appears in Figure 1 will confirm the successful installation of QEMU.įigure 1: Testing QEMU after installation Creating a new virtual machine On my Fedora system, I used the su command to get the necessary root privileges and install the binaries using make install. After compilation, QEMU binaries should be installed in their proper locations. Once you are done with the configure script, compile the source code with the make command. If there’s any issue, it will probably be some missing library or header files, which you can look for, and install. Hopefully, you will not run into any trouble during the configure script run.

(It can be built for other architectures too, like ARM, PPC, SPARC, etc.) Let’s install the Ubuntu distro in the virtual machine - that’s the reason we’ve chosen to build QEMU for the i386 architecture: $. Extract the tar ball and go to the extracted directory: $ tar -zxvf qemu-0.14.0.tar.gz The first thing is to download the QEMU source code the current version as of this writing is 0.14 and you’ll find it here.

Linux qemu tutorial