Quickly create and run optimised Windows, macOS and Linux virtual machines
Introduction
Quickemu is a wrapper for the excellent QEMU that attempts to automatically “do the right thing”, rather than expose exhaustive configuration options. You decide what operating system you want to run, and Quickemu will figure out the best way to do it for you.
The original objective of the project was to enable quick testing of Linux distributions where the virtual machine configurations can be stored anywhere (such as external USB storage or your home directory) and no elevated permissions are required to run the virtual machines.
**Today, Quickemu includes comprehensive support for macOS, Windows, most of the BSDs, novel non-Linux operating systems such as FreeDOS, Haiku, KolibriOS, OpenIndiana, ReactOS, and more.
Features
- macOS Sonoma, Ventura, Monterey, Big Sur, Catalina, Mojave & High Sierra
- Windows 10 and 11 including TPM 2.0
- Ubuntu and all the official Ubuntu flavours
- Nearly 1000 operating system editions are supported!
- Full SPICE support including host/guest clipboard sharing
- VirtIO-webdavd file sharing for Linux and Windows guests
- VirtIO-9p file sharing for Linux and macOS guests
- QEMU Guest Agent support; provides access to a system-level agent via standard QMP commands
-
Samba file sharing for Linux, macOS and Windows guests (if
smbdis installed on the host) - VirGL acceleration
- USB device pass-through
- Smartcard pass-through
- Automatic SSH port forwarding to guests
- Network port forwarding
- Full duplex audio
- Braille support
- EFI (with or without SecureBoot) and Legacy BIOS boot
- Graphical user interfaces available
Quick start
Once Quickemu is installed, there are two simple steps to create and run a virtual machine:
-
quickgetautomatically downloads the ISO image for the operating system you want to run and creates a configuration file for the virtual machine.
quickget nixos unstable
-
quickemustarts the virtual machine using the configuration file created byquickget.
quickemu --vm nixos-unstable.conf
-
Execute
quickget(with no arguments) to see a list of all the supported operating systems.
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