intelliLinux A blog about Innovation and Information

For the past 6 months or so I have claimed to anyone who asks that QtEmu is about ready for it's 2.0 release - and I think I'm totally right about that. QtEmu is an app that is basically trying to be like vmWare workstation, but better. It's not quite there yet, but it's already pretty good. It is based on the work of uwolfer, the mind behind the massive improvements to KRDC in kde, and he has played a key role in helping me improve it this much.

In the past 6 months or so I have added a number of big features - things like automatic USB support, local file socket VNC support (this makes connections a lot more secure) and a bunch of other things. At the moment I'm pretty sure the only thing holding it back is the fact that VNC screen updates are rather slow - but that's the case in KRDC as well.

KRDC is the upstream kde app that I've 'borrowed' the vnc code from (thanks again uwolfer!), and I'm starting to look through it to figure out how to speed up drawing, but honestly it's not my top priority at the moment (college, job, house, wife.... you know the drill).

I consider QtEmu to be either early beta or late alpha. I haven't had any crashes with it for ages,  and it's relatively complete. There's always another thing I'd like to add, but hey isn't that always the case?

So here's a few more of the cooler features that QtEmu has, for those of you who havn't heard of it yet (I bet that's most of you):

New/Cool Features

• Runs virtual machines using QEMU or KVM
• Embeds the view within the application to reduce clutter
• Shows a preview image of the machine when it is not running
• Supports multiple running machines in one instance of QtEmu using tabs
• Full screen mode
• Scales the machine's screen up/down to make it fit the available space if you want
• Seamless mouse support
• Configurable sound support
• Partial network support (doesn't touch your host's settings, so you need to create bridges and stuff yourself)
• Access to the machine console in a tab of the app
• Statistics about your VM image
• Pause/suspend/resume
• Let a machine keep running when you've closed QtEmu, and reconnect to it when you start QtEmu back up.
• It's pretty
• Uses only Qt for now, i'll probably add some kde specific stuff later though. I'm still trying to decide how KDE can help me with this app.

It of course comes complete with bugs, including but probably not limited to:

• Slowish screen updates sometimes
• Some people have had trouble with the VNC display not showing up
• If you select a USB device in one machine, it will still let oyu select it in another
• Scaling doesn't work right immediately after resolution changes, you need to disable/reenable scaling to fix this for the moment. It's just a simple button press.
• Fullscreen mode freaks out if you are using synergy to share your keyboard/mouse with another machine - I don't know if this is fixable.
• It lets you do things like assign your primary keyboard/mouse usb devices to the virtual machine. this is generally a bad idea and hard to turn off without your keyboard and mouse.

How to get it

Instructions for downloading are at http://qtemu.org near the bottom - the current version is only in SVN for the moment.

It works well for me, and works pretty well for a few other people, but it hasn't been tested much more than that.

Screenshots:

 Running Fedora with windows in the background tab:

 Running Windows with Fedora in a background tab:

 Showing the settings tab with USB settings open: