Following the release of Debian Wheezy, I have (finally) updated my set
of Debian QEMU images for
both Squeeze (6.0.8) and Wheezy (7.3). The following images are now
available:
Each of these directories contains a GPG signed README.txt file with the
md5sums all files, detailed instructions how to run these images and
especially the minimum QEMU version to use.
The requirements to run the default desktop environment have increased a
lot between Squeeze and Wheezy. An accelerated graphics card is now
needed to be able to use Gnome (unless you use the fallback mode), which
is not something provided by QEMU (actually there is now a QXL
para-virtualized video card, but the driver is only in unstable). In
addition GDM now needs more than 128MiB to start, while this is the
default amount of memory provided for virtual machines. I have therefore
decided to switch the default desktop environment on the Wheezy images
to Xfce and the display manager to LightDM. Both Gnome and GDM are still
installed on the images, and the original default can easily be restored
using the following commands:
update-alternatives --auto x-session-manager
echo /usr/sbin/gdm3 > /etc/X11/default-display-manager
Beside this the new images only contain minor changes. The filesystems
have been tweaked to not run fsck after a certain amount of days, and
locales-all and openssh-server are now installed in all images. For MIPS
and MIPSEL, 64-bit kernels are now also installed and provided, so that
it is possible to choose between a 32-bit or a 64-bit kernel (see the
README.txt for more details).
There is no Debian Wheezy SPARC image available, as QEMU does not fully
support SPARC64 yet (it is actually possible to run it, but then the VM
crashes often), and Debian Wheezy now only supports 64-bit kernels. I
will also invest time to build an S390X image, but so far I haven't been
successful on that.
The following images are still available at the same location, though
they haven't been updated:
- sparc (Etch)
- SH4 (Sid from a few
years ago)