Testing Intrepid Ibex with QEMU

In one of the first posts I told about testing the new version of Ubuntu. In that post I had just upgraded muy ubuntu 7.10 to ubuntu 8.04 Heard5, that was, one month before ubuntu 8.04 becomes stable. I didn't have any several problem but to be honest I had lots of lucky.

Now I am going to test the next ubuntu release, this is ubuntu 8.10 or if you prefer Intrepid Ibex.
According to the ubuntu release schedule the last version to test if the Alpha 4. Two months left for the release.

This time I am not going to trush on luck. In one of the last sessions of the Master on Free Software, Berto told us about Virtualization. Among the virtualization systems about Berto told us I liked specially QEMU, so I decided to use it in order to test ubuntu 8.10. These are the steps that I followed:

- First I downloaded the iso image of ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 4 from here.

- Installing QEMU:

$sudo apt-get install qemu

- Then I created a qemu file image, this will be my virtual hard disk, doing:

$qemu-img create -f qcow2 ~/intrepid.img 4G

where 4G is the size of the virtual hard disk.

- Now I could install ubuntu 8.10 in that virtual hard disk from the iso image just doing:

$qemu -hda ~/intrepid.img -cdrom intrepid-desktop-i386.iso -boot d -m 512

where 512 is the size of the RAM.

- Finally to run ubuntu 8.10 after installing it:

$qemu -hda ~/intrepid.img -m 512


Some tips:

- If you are using a 64 bits operative system you should use qemu-system-x86_64 as command instead of qemu.

- If you want the virtual system run faster you can install the qemu accelerator:

$sudo apt-get install kqemu-common

you will need to load the kernel module for the accelerator:

$sudo modprobe kqemu

then you can run qemu with the option --kernel-kqemu to use the accelerator.

Gtranslator 2.0 is comming...

It has been a long time since I decided to start to collaborate with the development of gtranslator, first as my dissertation in order to get my degree as Technical Engineer in Computer Sciences and now as my practicum in the Master on Free Software working at Igalia.

Gtranslator is a PO files editor that was created by Fatih Demir and maintained until October 2007 by Ross Golder when he transfered the maintenance to Juanjo and me. Thank you guys for trusting on us. It is not very common that there are two maintainers in a gnome project but in this case I think we are a good team, Juanjo is the experience and I am the enthusiasm.

For the last months we have been working a lot with Ignacio Casal trying to migrating gtranslator to Gobject and implementing some new features:

• Support for different profiles with information about the translator and language.
• Translation memory.
• Plugin system
• Plugins for OpenTran, alternate language, integration with subersion, diff...
• Catalog manager for PO Files.

All this features are working right now and we hope to make a beta release as soon as possible so that translators can check them.
Besides we are preparing a new web page with all the information about the new features, a roadmap for the future and information about how to use the program and how to collaborate with its development.

We are thinking also in changing the name for the project. So far we had created a section into gtranslator's wiki where people can write its suggestions for the new name but this decision it's not definitive because change the name for a project it is a decision more complicate than it seems to be. In fact this is worth analyzing in another post.