Over the weekend I "nursed" a cold at home rather than go to my LUG meeting as I had intended. After 1 g of paracetamol and plenty of hot honey and lemon tea I was able to get moving. I decided to give VirtualBox a go as it is now included in the official Debian Lenny repositories. I've used Qemu before, which VirtualBox shares some code with, but never found it that fast and though the kqemu kernel module is available now in Debian I didn't find many guest OSes that worked with it properly.

VirtualBox went in quickly from aptitude install, though I did have to use the Debian module-assistant to auto-install the VirtualBox kernel component, and manually add myself to the virtualbox group.

Comparing the two I found VirtualBox faster than Qemu, with measurably lower CPU load on the host system. However Windows98 didn't have any suitable graphics drivers in the VirtualBox, so it runs as only 16-colour VGA and I couldn't get sound to work at all with VirtualBox on either Windows98 or Windows NT4.

On Qemu I found Windows 98, NT4 and 2K all worked okay, though I needed different network cards on Win98 than the NTs. Sound and graphics worked on all of them, unlike VirtualBox, but I only ever got the kqemu kernel mode tool to work with NT4, the others all BSOD. Several Linux and BSDs worked under Qemu without a hitch, but again I never got kqemu to work with them.

I only really want a windows environment to play the original Age of Empires game, so as I have a working WINE environment I thought I'd give it a go too. It installed without a hitch, and would start okay, but I can't get it to recognise my genuine AoE CD or detect my network stack. I know networking works under WINE as Eudora is perfectly happy to talk IMAP to my home server.