Overview

On top of the main window you'll find the toolbar with the buttons to open the settings and launch the current job to xterm, directly or managed.

Below the toolbar are the 4 tabs with the lists for: All images in your main folder, all configured physical devices, the named machines and the Running jobs.

My machines

The My machines list is something like a bookmark collection. You can add configured (or even unconfigured) boot images from the main images list or the devices list to my machines by rightclicking an image and choosing "Add to My machines" or by selecting it and clicking the add button beside the selected image name. This opens a dialog where you can enter a name for the machine, select an icon and add it to the list. Every new machine will be added to the end of the list. You can easily reorder them by drag'n drop.

Default bootimage folder

This is the main folder for your Qemu images. You can set the path for this in the [[Documentation:Manual:Installation_and_configuration|main settings]]

Setting up machines

The Qemu settings panel

Clicking an entry in the images or the bookmarks list selects the image for editing or launching. The selected image path appears in the "current emu image" input field. Right of the field is the button to select an external file. Depending on your settings, the configuration panel for the selected image will appear automatically on selecting it or you have to open the panel by clicking the large Show settings button on the bottom of the main window.

This panel provides all options to setup your Qemu emulation settings for the selected boot image. Please read the  Qemu manual for details. Below the configuration panes you find a command line to enter additional custom option for the qemu command to launch for this job. There you can enter all valid qemu commandline options. These options also will be stored with the settings for this image. By clicking Save you store the changes to the selected image. Clicking Cancel will reject your changes and restore the last stored settings.

Main settings

The section to set up the boot behaviour and choose additional volumes

Hardware

Most common Qemu hardware settings

Setup network

First it's up to select main networking mode out of: No networking, usemode network and custom setup. Usermode is the Qemu default setting and is also the default in Qemulator for all not configured boot images. If you need easy access to internet and LAN from the client system via Qemu-managed dhcp and routing but no access from host system to client, usermode networking is what you need. In this case feel free to change the hostname and vlan or leave network settings untouched.

No network just disables any network support for this machine.

For special needs, Qemulator now provides almost every network options provided by Qemu. For this select "Cusom setup" and do your configurations as described in the  Qemu manual. If you understood the network concepts you want to use, you surely will understand the Qemulator Network tools ;-). After choosing Custom network setup, there are 4 Buttons on the left side and the two lists "Network cards" and "Redirections" became active. "Add network card" opens a dialog where you can choose the networking type and set up the configuration for the device. Add redirections opens a dialog to mass-add port redirections. Edit opens the configuration dialog for either the selected network card or redirection. Remove will remove selected network card or redirection without any request. To undo this, you have to click cancel on bottom right corner of the main window to reload the last stored configuration for this boot image.

SMB-share is available for usermode and custom networking. Just select a directory and select the checkbox to make the share available for the client.

Qemu settings

For now there is only one option: The kqemu usage mode.

Run the emulation

Qemulator provides 3 ways to start an emulation:

* Managed This is the default u should use in most cases. Qemulator will be startet redirecting its monitor terminal to a pseudo terminal device and Qemulator watches this pseudo terminal to manage the emulation.

* Unmanaged If you want to use qemulator only as a kind of bookmark manager for your Qemu emulations and nothing else, this is the right mode for you. Qemulator will launch a normal untouched Qemu instance and don't shows the running emulation in it's job list so interactive control over the control monitor is not available.

* Run in xterm This is the same as unmanaged but now Qemu will be started in a new opening xterm terminal session.

If you started the emulation with job management (by pressing the right run button in the toolbar), the running job will appear in the "Running jobs" list. right to the name of the booted image you see the pts device that Qemulator uses to communicate with the qemu session. Please avoid to cat or read these devices any other way while performing changes in the control panel of Qemulator, this will cause Qemulator to hang up.