On occasion, it might be nice to run Windows or Linux on my PowerBook, but I don’t yet have Virtual PC. So I tried the free QEMU emulator today. According to Free OS Zoo, the best way to run QEMU on the Mac is to use Q, a Cocoa frontend. So I downloaded Q and an Ubuntu Warty disk image (torrent) and gave it a spin.
Well, it worked, as you can see from this screenshot of Ubuntu running on my PowerBook.
However, the speed leaves something to be desired. A LOT to be desired. Booting is like watching paint dry and interacting with GNOME is downright painful.
There is a QEMU Accelerator that supposedly gets pretty good performance, but unfortunately it’s only for x86 platforms.
Funny, this is the second time I’ve seen a mention of this utility today. It didn’t look to me like it supported running FreeBSD, though. Am I missing something or are you not planning to do that?
It looks like there is a FreeBSD image at http://free.oszoo.org/download.html – I wonder if it can accept VMWare images – that would be cool.
But actually that wasn’t my plan, since I already have a FreeBSD box. I was most interested in running Windows so I could run things like YME and MS Project. From my experience with Ubuntu, I suspect that the performance is going to be less than satisfactory.
QEMU Accelerator is a virtualisation layer rather than an emulation layer. By definition it can’t be ported to Power PC. Having said that, if the author ever ports it to the new Intel Macs then QEMU will fly on those.
Here’s hoping…
Ubuntu can be run on old processors using the XFCE desktop, they call the project Xubuntu. There is no iso for it yet, but soon the project is going to start releasing its own images.
I have found the XFCE based Xubuntu tends to run much faster than the Gnome front end used in Ubuntu on older hardware. You can install the XFCE desktop with apt-get.
Destructions are available here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/InstallingXubuntu
It seems as if my experience with resurrecting old PCs may have a parallel in the emulation world, so maybe running lighter Xubuntu may be quicker here too, like on old Intels and AMDs.