Random thoughts, tips & tricks about Slackware-Linux, Lego and Star Wars

Archive for the 'Virtualization' Category

March 14th, 2011 by Niels Horn in , ,

I use Qemu for several tasks, but its primary use is for testing programs. It has a wonderful feature called "snapshots", where you can save a known state of the Virtual Machine you can fall back to if anything goes wrong.
For my recent adventure with keyboard layouts I researched several sources on Qemu and noticed [...]

March 11th, 2011 by Niels Horn in ,

This post explains how to get QEMU working on a host with a pt_BR (ABNT2) keyboard fro Brazil. These keyboards have the "dead" accent-keys and a few modifications that are specific to this layout.
The Problem
For a long time there have been some problems with Brazilian keyboards and QEMU.
In theory, using the standard QEMU, without a [...]

September 5th, 2010 by Niels Horn in , , , , |

No, I did not abandon ARMedslack, the official port of Slackware to the ARM architecture… It was simply a matter of lack of time (or a question of priorities, depending of your point of view).
But this weekend I finally found some time to setup a clean build environment based on the stable ARMedslack 13.1 version.
The [...]

February 15th, 2010 by Niels Horn in , , , , ,

Since I was doing some tests with Slackware running on different platforms (Slack/390, Slack/390x, ArmedSlack on Qemu, etc.) I wanted to compare the performance of the different setups.
I used a (quite old) utility called nbench that was originally written in 1995 but still is a simple way to compare how processors perform, emulated or real. [...]

February 15th, 2010 by Niels Horn in , ,

In preparation for a future project, I built Hercules on ArmedSlack, running in Qemu. The idea was to test the concept of running the mainframe emulator on the Arm processor.
The result was quite usable, at least for the older mainframe operating systems like MVS.
Here are some screenshots:
Starting Hercules on ArmedSlack:

The 3270 terminal connecting to the [...]

June 13th, 2009 by Niels Horn in , ,

Last October I wrote some posts about installing older Slackware versions on VMware. I have since sort of abandoned VMware for several reasons:

It might be free for personal use, but it is not Open software
It is a hassle to keep it functioning with every kernel change
The latest versions need PAM, which can be installed on [...]

November 9th, 2008 by Niels Horn in , , |

Last Friday lots up upgrades were released for Slackware-current, including a new kernel, 2.6.27.5Since changing a kernel usually has some consequences, I waited until today, Sunday, to apply all upgrades.As anticipated, my VMware-server stopped working. Normally I run the /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl script to reconfigure VMware and recompile the needed modules for the new kernel.But this time [...]

October 14th, 2008 by Niels Horn in , ,

Well, I finally managed to get a higher resolution in VMware, at least with Slackware 4.0I discovered that VMware-server 1.0.7 still includes the drivers for XFree86 3.* & 4.*
In XFree86 3.* there is a separate "server" for each type of interface: one for monochrome cards (who remembers Hercules?), one for simple VGA, one for SVGA, [...]

October 14th, 2008 by Niels Horn in , , , |

Working with fvwm2 wasn't too much fun… So I started looking for and old Slackware version that had KDE.I found out that my oldest CD with KDE was Slackware 4.0:

As it says on the cover, it comes with KDE 1.1, so this was my new project.According to the cover from the original 4-disc box, we're [...]

October 12th, 2008 by Niels Horn in , ,

After successfully installing Slackware 3.5 and discovering that Slackware 1.1.2 was still available on the internet at sunsite.unc.edu I simply had to try it…
At first I had no luck, as this version does not support the standard VMware network card (PCnet32) and also lacks support for IDE CDRom drives. The VMware emulated SCSI cards (BusLogic [...]