QEMU

QEMU is a full system emulator that evolved into a foray into the space of hardware virtualization on Intel machines.

• Q, QemuX – By now extinct [macOS] front-ends
• The QCOW2 Image Format
• Quickemu - a wrapper for QEMU that can do automatic installations
• Rising Prism Single GPU Passthrough a set of scripts to enable single GPU pass-through for Windows hosts on KVM.

Installing Windows XP from an ISO image on modern versions with sane mouse pointer and networking support:

qemu-system-i386 -localtime -cdrom /vagrant/win.iso -m 384 -boot d windows.qcow -vnc :1 -usb -usbdevice tablet -net nic -net user

Before switching to Citrix as my main work environment, I spent a good while running [QEMU 0.7.2 pre-compiled for kernel 2.6.13_1.1526] (taken from here)

My personal invocation of QEMU on a Fedora Core 4 box (2.4GHz, 1GB RAM) for a Windows virtual machine (3.8GB disk in a qcow compressible image, containing a replica of my corporate environment) was this:

/usr/local/bin/qemu -hda xp.qcow -user-net -k pt -m 512 -redir tcp:3389::3389 -nographic -localtime

I sometimes used -snapshot (along with Outlook in non-cached Exchange mode) for an instantly resettable session.

Since I don’t care much for Windows eye candy and prefer having a roving desktop, I usually connected via Remote Desktop like so:

rdesktop -0 -a 16 -k pt localhost:3389 -g 1280×1000 -D -P -K

The above set the Remote Desktop window to take up the whole screen minus the 24 pixels taken up by the Gnome bar, and allowed me to use Ctrl-Shift (Arrows) to instantly switch between virtual desktops.