OSDev.org

I recently switched from Windows to Linux (Kubuntu 13.04), and I'm trying to get set up for osdev again

On Windows, I used VirtualBox and Bochs (and very occasionally VMware).

On Linux, I've added the VirtualBox PPA so I've got an up to date version of VirtualBox, and I was wondering if the community here had any recommendations for PPAs for QEMU and Bochs? Obviously Ubuntu has packages for them, but the Bochs one is over 2 years out of date. The QEMU package is reasonably recent - 1.4.0, from last February - although there have been several QEMU releases since then. So if I can get more recent versions of Bochs and QEMU through package management that would be great

Hi. Don't rely on other people to provide packages for you, especially third party repositories may include malware. This is a good opportunity to learn how to download source code and compile it yourself on Linux. It may take some time and require some skill to build qemu and bochs from the ground, but it's worth it so you don't depend on third parties for doing it for you. This means you can always run the very latest release of said software.

Compilation and installation of software from source code on Linux can be scary at first, but basically it usually boils down to ./configure --prefix=/where/you/want/to/install/the/software --other-needed-options && make && make install, and then adding /where/you/want/to/install/the/software/bin to your PATH if it isn't already. It may be a bit tricky to install the dependencies and needed development packages to build the software, though.The apt-get build-dep foo command will install all the needed stuff to build foo, if you have source repositories enabled. You can find plenty of guides online for this.

Bochs is an excellent example why package managers are grossly underpowered.

You want a series of configurations installed at any time, and for pretty much all people here a version with and a version without integrated debugger is the practical minimum. Package managers only provide one.

I hadn't considered different configurations! The Windows binaries come with bochs.exe and bochsdbg.exe, which are identical except one has the integrated debugger, so I handn't worried about that before. Of course, a package manager could do the same - though you'd still be stuck with whatever configuration the package maintainer otherwise chose.

Bochs is now compiled, and QEMU on the way and looking promising