4 Installing QEMU

First, install the emulator. The emulator, as suggested by the previous section, is packaged in a zip file. Windows XP can unzip zip files natively. Extract the files to a folder that you can find. For this module, we assume the files are extracted to c:\qemu.

Now, go to the folder where all the files are extracted. You should find a file called qemu-Win.bat, double click that file and let it run. It starts a small Linux shell as a verification that the installation was successful.

Although you can use QEMU just the way it is, it helps to improve performance if you install the accelerator. Note that the accelerator is not open sourced! You are not permitted to redistributed without the explicit consent of the developer.

To install the accelerator, open the accelerator file (kqemu...). 7-Zip can open this kind of archive file. Locate and extract the files kqemu.inf and kqemu.sys to a known folder. You can drag-and-drop from 7-zip to the desktop of any folder. Then, right click kqemu.inf, and select ``Open with'' from the pop-up menu. Open it with Wordpad (at the bottom of the list), then save the file, and close Wordpad. We need to do this because the original file is a Unix text file, not a DOS text file. Wordpad does the conversion automatically.

Next, right click kqemu.inf, but this time select ``install'' instead. This should install the service. Note that you need to start the service explicitly using the comand net start kqemu.