Monthly Archives: April 2007

DudesConf and Last.fm update

We had a great time last weekend at DudesConf. We met a lot of Debian people from all parts of Spain (and some non-Spaniards too) and had some interesting talks and BOFs. Check Mario’s report and don’t miss our photo with Steve Langasek!

As usual, John has been doing the hard work and has updated the Debian diff for the Last.fm client.

I have been very busy these days so I had no time to release the packages until today. These are the news:

  • Added Turkish translation.
  • Added a patch to prevent text relocations. Users of 64-bit architectures should benefit from this.
  • I’ve compiled a new package for Ubuntu Feisty (although the one for Edgy should work as well).

You can get the packages here.

QEMU in five minutes

Some friends have been asking me how to use QEMU. While there are many other virtualization packages (such as Virtual Box, KVM or the non-free VMware Player), QEMU has been around for a while, it’s already packaged in Debian stable and it’s really easy to use.

Moreover, the (optional) kernel accelerator kqemu has been released under the GPL a couple of months ago, so it’s a good moment to give QEMU a try.

Let’s see the basic usage:

  • Install QEMU.
    $ apt-get install qemu
  • Create a hard disk image. It’s 2 GB in this example, but don’t worry about the size of the file, it will grow dinamically as you write data to it.
    $ qemu-img create -f qcow hd.img 2G
  • Install things in your new hard disk image. You can boot from a CD-ROM, or an ISO image, a floppy…
    $ qemu -hda hd.img -cdrom /dev/cdrom -boot d
    $ qemu -hda hd.img -cdrom cdimage.iso -boot d
    $ qemu -hda hd.img -fda /dev/fd0 -boot a
    $ qemu -hda hd.img -fda floppy.img -boot a
  • Once the system is installed in your virtual hard disk, you can boot directly from it:
    $ qemu -hda hd.img
  • Or you can forget about hard disks and just use a bootable CD:
    $ qemu -cdrom livecd.iso

And that’s it! QEMU has built-in SMB, TFTP, DNS and DHCP servers. Everything in user space, so you don’t need special permissions nor additional configuration: no kernel modules, no tun/tap interfaces… nothing!. I said it was very easy to use, didn’t I? 😉

Of course there’s a lot more, but you won’t need it for the basic usage.

If you’re too lazy to install an operating system inside QEMU, you can download a hard disk image built by someone else. Note that QEMU can read the VMware disk format, so you’ve got a really big collection of images ready to work.

And if you want a bit more, you can compile the kqemu kernel accelerator, which will make QEMU run faster.

Now I can remember the old times when I first installed Debian…
Debian bo inside QEMU

DudesConf is here!

DudesConf is starting in less than 10 days!

DudesConf is a DebConf-like meeting for Spanish-speaking Debian developers that will take place in Corunha University from 13 to 15 April 2007.

The program includes several talks, workshops, bug-squashing parties and BOFs. I’m sure that we’ll have a great time and of course it will be a great opportunity to meet Debian people from everywhere.

Just like other free software-related events such as Guademy, GUADEC-ES and GUADEC, DudesConf is sponsored by Igalia.

See you there!!