Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

QEMU: a multihost, multitarget emulator

2006; Belltown Media; Volume: 2006; Issue: 145 Linguagem: Inglês

1938-3827

Daniel Bartholomew,

Distributed and Parallel Computing Systems

A few months ago, I suddenly found myself with an I-need-to-run-just-one-Windows-application problem. When I had started at my current job, I was determined finally to be Windows-free at work, just like I have been at home for several years. To that end, after I had unpacked my shiny new work computer, I erased Windows, installed my current favorite Linux distribution, and set up Ximian Evolution to connect to the Microsoft Exchange server. I thought that I had finally arrived at Linux nirvana. It was not to be. Microsoft's Exchange mail server has this feature where a team, or group of people, can access a shared mailbox. My manager thought it would be a good idea to set up one for our team and have clients send e-mail to that address instead of to each of us individually. With the shared inbox in place, I found myself needing to check it several times a day. Evolution can connect to shared mailboxes, but not in the way I have to connect to mine. My department, being Linux-friendly and security-conscious, is not on the corporate network, so those who are on Windows-based systems in my department need to configure their Outlook e-mail client to connect to the Exchange server over HTTP. Evolution seems to support connecting to shared mailboxes only when you are on the same network as the Exchange server, not via the HTTP method. There was no way around it. I had to run Outlook. And not just any version. I had to run Outlook 2003, which is the version that can use the HTTP-connection method. The problem with Outlook 2003 that older versions of Outlook do not have is that it is not compatible with Wine or CrossOver Office from CodeWeavers, which ruled out what I considered to be the obvious first-choice solution for running it on Linux. My options were therefore: Go back to using Windows. 1. Find another way to run Outlook 2003. 2. I did not want to go back to using Windows, not for only one application, so I started looking around for answers to the other option. My requirements were simple: it had to be able to run Outlook 2003, it had to be cheap, it had to be usable and it had to be reliable--no crashing. VMware is an obvious choice for this sort of thing, but as I was footing the bill myself, VMware was not an option. After a little bit of searching, I found an excellent VMware alternative: QEMU.