QEMU is a CPU emulator that has recently forayed into the space of hardware virtualization on Intel machines.
Resources:
- Q, QemuX - Mac OS X front-ends
- FreeOSZoo - pre-built disk images
- A good starting point for tun networking
- The QCOW Image Format
Notes:
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 XP virtual machine (3.8GB disk in a qcow compressible image, containing a replica of my corporate environment):
$ screen $ /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 1280x1000 -D -P -K
The above sets the Remote Desktop window to take up the whole screen minus the 24 pixels taken up by the Gnome bar, and allows me to use Ctrl-Shift (Arrows) to instantly switch between virtual desktops.
I usually have a pager on the Gnome bar and place the Windows taskbar at the top, which allows me to see both Windows and Gnome running tasks at a glance.