The Portable Freeware Collection Forums

Hi,

I'd like to suggest QEMU for the collection.
The web-site is http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/ and the windows executable can be obtained from http://www.h7.dion.ne.jp/~qemu-win/.

QEMU allows you to run many operating systems (e.g. Linux or XP) from a disk image in an emulated PC (x86 or ARM, Sparc, PowerPC or MIPS).
This way you can run your non-portable applications in a portable emulator!

Although it is certainly not as fast as VMware it has the advantage that it has user-mode network simulation built in. This makes portable network access possible (you don't have to install services or virtual network connectors on the host PC).

I personally think QEMU is a really cool piece of software!

Enjoy,

Needless to say you need a USB harddisk with a couple of gigs free for the disk image...

Thanks for the suggestion! QEMU is essentially command-line driven and presents quite a challenge for beginners, but I played around with the various GUI options listed and liked Qemu Manager a lot, so I have added that to the database instead.

Very old topic update: QEMU v5.2.0 released 2021-02-08 (changelog and download at https://qemu.weilnetz.de/w64/2021/).

Topic update: QEMU v8.2.0 released 2023-12-24 (release announcment at https://www.qemu.org/2023/12/20/qemu-8-2-0/).

While the main site is www.qemu.org, latest Windows installers can be downloaded from https://qemu.weilnetz.de/w64/ and https://qemu.weilnetz.de/x32/ for 64 and 32-bit environments, respectively.

There's also a highly detailed changelog at https://wiki.qemu.org/ChangeLog/8.2.

BTW, on other platforms, QuickEmu makes easy to create and run optimized Windows, macOS and Linux desktop virtual machines: https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickemu.

Here's a step-by-step guide to creating virtual disks with CLI utility qemu-img: https://linuxconcept.com/creating-virtual-disks-qemu-img/ (qemu-img for Windows can be downloaded from https://cloudbase.it/qemu-img-windows/).

BTW, one of the coolest things that can be done with QEMU is running SerenityOS, a *nix-based OS reminiscent of Windows 95/2000 graphic environment which has no installation media -- for the overly simple instructions, check:

• https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/blob/master
  /Documentation/BuildInstructionsWindows.md#setting-up-qemu

Other QEMU related topics: viewtopic.php?t=20312, viewtopic.php?t=25444