btw: if you know a working solution for the trac ticket spam problem, say having a barrier for spam robots to create and comment tickets, please let me know! Having the ticket section disabled although it could be really helpful in collecting bugs is not very amusing.

A detailed article with photos of evidence will show up on Q blog in the next days.

So far, cordney*

I know it’s quite some time since the Q Update February ’06. I intentionally wanted to post an update report about the work behind Q at least once each month, but got lost in time and study. It’s been happening quite a lot since February, so I want to sum it up here:

We now have a pretty much stable universal binary, the emulation part works very nicely and we have more time working on features making the user experience with Windows and other systems better. It’s also been happening quite a lot in software, mainly Parallels and BootCamp from Apple.

First is BootCamp: Although it’s only BETA software it works pretty nice from what I have heard. Most of you probably don’t want to switch off your Mac to quickly boot into Windows, I am sure. For those who want to play some games or do some heavy graphics processing (e.g. CAD software) it is a really viable option and we have to thank Apple for this!

Secondly Parallels: The speed is pretty much impressing, it runs at native speed (except for graphics)! The user interface is not very Mac OS X like, but they can work on it. Of course it runs faster than Q atm I have to admit. Work on the virtualizer for Q has been done but got stuck at the end of March. We will give more info on the current status of the virtualizer soon. All I can say is that we are still there and working on Q!

Apart from this many work has been done for Q in the last week. I finished my secret FreeOSZoo downloader for free operating systems that can be downloaded and then started right from within Q (thanks to the developers of the great Transmission Bittorrent Client I had to incorporate into Q for this). We now have our own dedicated server with an own domain running with a subversion versioning system, Trac project management including a wiki and many more to maintain Q development. The most important thing is the wiki included with Trac. We already started working on articles explaining the features of Q and howtos for installing several guests but there is a lot more work to do. We would be happy if you could help out so we can fully concentrate on Q development. If you want to help out drop us a mail and we will give you an account for writing.

I think that’s all for now. For all of you who are curious about the new domain, the wiki and the subversion system: kju-app.org. Also if you have suggestions for the wiki and wanted topics drop us a mail or comment this article.

Have a nice weekend, cordney*

http://cordney.com/q/mirror

Q on Intel-boxes is somewhat not quite stable, Mike is working on that, but it’s not quite easy sticking into the QEMU code…

I am currently writing examen in 6 courses, the first one managed today, puhhh! BUT I am working on Q at least two hours a day in the evening. Hope I can order my new iBook (“MacBook”?) next week right after the next Apple press event (please, Steve…!) so I can work on Intel soon.

So long, cordney*
P.S.: Oh man, my English is really bad, should write more articles here to practise it!

Update: Oh and forgot something, from Apple Downloads :

1. Download Q (Latest unstable build). Drag it to your applications folder and double-click.

2. Choose “Import Guest PCs from QemuX” from the Tools menu.


3. Wait. Q will copy all settings and virtual drives from the QemuX PCs, this will take a few minutes, so sit back and relax. Don’t wonder about the spinning beachball, it’s ok.

Once Q is finished importing, it will show a list of imported QemuX PCs.


4. Start enjoying the great features of Q!

If you do not want to use QemuX anymore, you can easily delete the following files and folders: /Applications/QemuX.app, /Applications/Qemu, ~/Documents/Qemu PC List.

If you have any questions or bug submissions, please write an e-mail to me: QemuX-(at)-cordney.com (replace the -(at)- with @).

Have fun! cordney*

UPDATE: There seemed to be a bug in Q with short harddisk names which affected the harddisk created by QemuX and led to a fatal boot error. This is fixed in the latest release (Q-0.8.0d562, 2/13/2006).

I already mentioned, that I was thinking about the QemuX future the last month. I had some really great ideas for a newer QemuX version, including a much nicer design but also some really cool features. Since the Mac OS X port of qemu became more and more powerful, thanks to the great work by Mike Kronenberg, it became the groundwork for a powerful system emulator. The intel switch by Apple, announced for mid 2006, is not the end, but another great chance for QemuX integrating the powerful qemu system emulator. Luckily I decided to make all this happen – I am already working on a new QemuX version, which will be version 1.0, because of the fundamental changes in the UI.

Beginning to implement the new UI, I decided to rewrite QemuX from the scratch. Nearly one year after the initial version 0.1 and many new programming skills later I noticed that the programming design is not flexible enough and became more and more complicated throughout development. That will of course require some time and the work I have to put in my study at university, which began last week, will also consume some time, so I please you to be patient. I will inform you of the progress in the next weeks.

See you, cordney*

I’ll explain it here shortly: My brother asked me a while ago, how my QemuX downloads were going, so I looked up and told him that it were about 22,000 this time. He was like “Wow!” and promised to give me a free beer when downloads reach the 25,000. So please help me out and download download download!

[Update]: Thanks to you I will now get my free beer! What a pity that I am in Bochum for the beginning of my study and my brother is in Berlin… Will talk to him later ’bout that…

[2nd Update]: On christmas I finally got my beer, a nice Flensburger Pilsener. Thanks to all of you again for making this happen!

I’ve been working at a German parcel service for a few hours daily to earn some money and you know, I also got a bit lazy. The thing is that I had to arrange my own life, I needed the time. I also thought about the future of QemuX in consideration to new circumstances: Apple’s Intel switch, perspectives for QemuX regarding my programming skills, competition with other apps, other projects I wanted to participate in… Now I settled down here where I am now, taking new steps in life, I can make some things clearer.

Life: Finishing my Abitur in 2003 I knew that I wanted to study at university. Directions were unclear for a long time, social work was considered, computer stuff, helping third world… You know, there is a time in life for a young man, where one asks himself: “Well, what is my task, what is my destiny in this system?” – And I don’t mean system stands for capitalism, society, social state, I think of destiny in a greater system, in a bigger context… man, it’s hard to describe.
Well, one would think helping the third world as a development aid worker would be the, let’s say ,’best’. My opinion about this changed in the last 2 years – I have another plan, but that’s secret… You will see. Something in society has to change, we have to built up a fair world, that’s not the way we can go on. We all should have learned from the past 2000 years and more… but we didn’t. Unfortunately. But things will change, for sure…

From October on I will study IT-Security at Ruhr-University Bochum. I think this can take me to a new direction- it’s interesting, powerful, responsible. Of course it’s a 600 kilometres move away from home, my first own flat, living alone… Thank god I have a family that supports me, my mom, my lil sis, my brother, my lovely grandparents…

Now I already live here in Bochum for about two weeks and I feel pretty comfortable! I visit a mathematics preparation course now from monday til’ friday and it’s quite cool, despite the fact that I feel a little lost, cause the topics are really hard.
In preparation to my courses and lectures I already bought some books: “Basics of electrical engineering” and “Java 5: First steps in programming”, in German, of course. Setting up Java 5 (which is not 5.0 but 1.5, crazy, he?) on OS X will be covered in another article later.

I hope you are now up-to-date and will read on here in my blog. I promise that I will from now on post a few more articles here.

So far, yours, cordney*

You may come here cause you are a friend of QemuX, my GUI for the Qemu System Emulator. QemuX is my first programming project for the Macintosh. Since 1999 I’m familiar with HTML, then in 2002 i started out some PHP programming and wrote some things like a board, simple chat, messaging system… for my own purpose. In May 2003 it was time for a new computer and a very good friend of mine, orangeboy, who already owned an iBook brought me to Mac. So since two years, my computer is an iBook G3, 900MHz, 640MB Ram, Airport and I’m very happy with it and never want to switch back to Windows.

Last summer I started some small coding on the Mac with the help of “Learning Cocoa with Objective-C” and the first challenge for me was to do a simple program to launch Qemu – that’s what you now know as QemuX. In February I began coding an app to do simple drag and drop between the iTunes Library and my sister’s non-Apple-Flash-MP3-Player. So I started investigating how iTunes organized all the files and about a month later I got a simple app which showed all songs and playlists from the iTunes Library in a similiar NSTableView like iTunes. But as I found out, you can simply drag songs from iTunes to the Finder, so my app was obsolete.

As I heard from the CenterStageProject I thought I could contribute the code not to waste it. And hey, they wanted me to do the iTunes/Music part of CenterStage. After reading and reading the Docs I think I got the basics to really start the hard work. After having some differences with the dev-team I decided to quit. But believe me, I did not waste the time with the iTunes stuff, it will be helpful later, for sure!

That’s enough for introduction, stay tuned for more posts…