Re: [Fwd: Some qemu+hurd questions]

[Samuel Thibault]

Svante Signell, le Sun 31 Oct 2010 19:40:29 +0100, a écrit :
> Installing Hurd with mini.iso as show in README.txt:
> qemu -m 512 -net nic,model=ne2k_pci -net user -hda hurd-install.qemu
> -cdrom ~/SW/hurd-installer/mini.iso -boot d
> 
> Installation went well, apt and grub2 work perfectly, however extremely
> slow, several hours for the installation.

This is not really surprising for a qemu-emulated installation.

> After the install I tried with
> -m 256, same common problem: one of the two CPUs loaded 100%, the other
> idle, almost all memory used and sloow.

Like Linux, Mach tries to use as much memory as possible to avoid Disk
I/O.

> Running the installed Hurd:
> qemu -m 256 -net nic,model=ne2k_pci -net user -hda hurd-install.qemu
> 
> - Does qemu have a terminal where I can get a scrollbar, without it is
> very difficult to catch all output.

Yes, you can use the -curses option to use text mode.

> - How to shut down Hurd in qemu properly? Just closing the qemu window
> hurd complained on an unclean shutdown and had to check disks.

Yes, it's just like you had cut the power cable. You could send a wish
request to the qemu devel mailing list for a "power" button" which
triggers ACPI stuff. It's however not supported by GNU Mach :)

> The solution I found so far is to shut down Hurd as root in the qemu
> window before closing the window.

That's the expected way.

> - When installing Hurd, no Swedish locale was found, I used the default.

Like standard Debian systems, you can install the locales package to get
Swedish locale support.

> The problem is that the US keyboard is used by qemu+hurd, while I have a
> Swedish keyboard. It is very difficult to type correctly since common
> characters are at strange positions, e.g. - is /, <shift>* is |, ö is :,
> etc. How do I get a Swedish keyboard mapping working in qemu+hurd? 

You need to run the Hurd console and use its xkb driver. It has however
not been really maintained and might just not even work ATM.

> - qemu seems to grab the mouse when clicking on the window, making it
> impossible to copy text from that window somewhere else. Is that
> solvable?

Again, use -curses.

> - qemu-kvm is also available in addition to qemu. Would things be faster
> with it, there seems to be some kernel modules added? Does my CPU, see
> below, support virtualisation?

As said by somebody else, it doesn't. You should however try to compile
the kqemu module, which accelerates emulation without special hardware
support.

> - Availability of Emacs, Arch Hurd has a working version, not Debian.
> I'm not so fluent in using vi or nano.

Did you try to install the emacs package? Debian doesn't install it by
default in the base system just because it takes quite some room
compared to e.g. nano, but it should be installable ATM.

> Computer is a dual Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz 32bit box running
> Debian unstable. I have only 512M memory on the box. Is that too little
> to run Linux+Hurd simultaneously?

It's a bit short on memory if you want to use Linux as a desktop with
e.g. run OpenOffice.org etc.

Samuel