Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Windows7 running on Powermac G5 (experimental) - part4

Recently, Lubuntu powerpc becomes stable and QEMU also becomes more stable and compatible.
I found the report of windows7 running on qemu / macport of OSX but it was reported to be still slow compared with VirtualPC for Mac 7.02
Then, I tried to run windows7 on QEMU2.0 / Lubuntu 14.04,1.

First, install qemu
           apt-get install qemu
    for sound emulation
           apt-get install pulseaudio

Second, I converted the previous disk image file installed windows7 starter (VPC for Mac 7) to qcow2 file.

           qemu-img convert -f vpc -O qcow2 diskimage.vhd diskimage.qcow2

QEMU for PPC-linux can simulate at most 2047 MB RAM while VPC7 can do max. 512MB.  QEMU can also be simulated multi-processor or -core, however windows7 starter supports only uniprocessor.
For sound emulation, "-soundhw ac97" option is needed and the driver must be installed manually (link).

          qemu-system-i386 -m 2047 -smp 2,cores=2,sockets=1,threads=1 -localtime -vga std -soundhw ac97 -hda diskimage.qcow2


Unfortunately, Windows7 on QEMU/Linux was slow as same as on VPC7 with ramdisk.
Sounds also work ....but with severe delay.

On my several trials, a little speed-up could be observed when a disk image file was on high-speed USB drive (I used SANDISK EXTREME) than on the internal SATA HDD.
Other faster devices (SSD or RAM disk) may show better perfomance.  I hope for the future updates, for expamle more RAM could be assign.

Friday, September 5, 2014

Garigarikun WIN !!

Garigarikun (ガリガリ君) is the most popular ice pop in Japan.  It is very inexpensive but delicious with a lottery.  I won at the first time while I had eaten over 50 ones in this summer !!  It is said that the winning rate is 1/32 (3%).


This stick can be bartered for another ice pop.

Monday, September 1, 2014

PowerPC Lubuntu kernel

When the new updates including kernel 3.13.0-35-powerpc-smp were installed, the bug appeared again.  I felt the kernel 3.13.0-33 and 3.13.0-34 were very stable.  So, the kernel was changed to 3.13.0-34 and it's working good.