Re: Emulating Raspberry Pi in Windows the easy way

[mjlally]

For anybody who isn't sure how to get qemu to emulate the Raspberry Pi in windows here is a zip folder to download.

Just download, extract all the contents and run the extracted run.bat file.

login is pi

password is raspberry

then type startx to get a window based desktop and it is ready to use.

There is a README.txt file for more information. The zip folder contains qemu for windows and the R Pi debian squeeze image. It works in Windows XP. I've only been able to test it briefly in Windows 7, seems to work. Should work in other versions of windows too.

Comments below deal with some issues such as changing keyboard layout.

[bredman]

Be very cautious of a first-time poster who tells you to download software to your Windows PC.

As a public service, I will try it on a disposable PC to see what my virus checker thinks.

[mjlally]

Hi there Bredman, sorry, hadn't thought of that side of it! The link to the sourceforge page is http://sourceforge.net/project.....muwindows/

you can check the contents without running anything. I would be grateful if you did test it however and post your thoughts here afterwards.

Thanks MJL

[bredman]

I have tested it in Windows Vista and it seems to be working. I can't get to an external network, even though I can reach my gateway. This is my first time to use qemu, so that's something new for me to learn.

I got no warnings from a corporate-grade virus checker, so there are no obvious problems. Apologies to mjlally, but we have to be cautious.

For anybody waiting for hardware, this would be a great way to get a feel of the Raspberry Pi.

Warning: The download file size is 460MB.

[bredman]

Apologies for the confusion above, networking is working OK.

The fault was between my chair and my keyboard. I forgot about some fairly aggressive security settings on my network.

There are some problems with colours, but this should not really impact the usability.

[mjlally]

Thanks for the feedback Bredman, no need to apologise for being cautious, I should have thought of it myself.

Sorry about the size of the download, will see if I can strip out anything.

[bredman]

I forgot to say thanks to mjlally for the effort he has put in.

Making things dirt simple will help new people take the plunge.

[hippy]

mjlally said:


For anybody who isn't sure how to get qemu to emulate the Raspberry Pi in windows here is a zip folder to download.


You're a hero.

Worked as advertised. Win XP SP2.

[Kphillis]

I was giving the emulation a try, and checked out the site. Would it be possible to place the code for Qemu on the website along with the possible compilation instructions?

Edit: I tried to use the basic shell commands and found the keyboard mapping is off... For example, when i ran the following command, the system failed to input this properly.

dmesg | less

This command instead of having the pipe operand "|", it wound up having the "#" key instead, and when i pressed "" it placed the wrong key yet again.

[DuncanKennedy]

Kphillis - I"m having the same problem - I think it relates to the default keyboard mapping being set up to a British keyboard. There have been a number of other post about remapping the keyboard on actual Pi"s so assume it"s not related to the Qemu emulation.

I"m going to try the remap and see if that cures things. In the meantime, try all of your shift keys to see what they produce. On my keyboard shift-2 produces the " character, although haven"t found an equivalent for the pipe | character.

Duncan

[bredman]

On a UK keyboard, the pipe character is shifted on the key to the left of "z".

[mjlally]

Editing this post - I'm afraid my suggested fix as outlined below does not work. Read post 14 for Duncan's fix which does work.

ok, it looks like qemu for windows uses the uk keyboard layout by default.

In the extracted folder "RPi Emulation" there is a folder called "qemu".

Inside this there is another folder called "keymaps"

The available keymaps in this version of qemu are in here. NOTE, file names are all in lower case.

Back up one level in the qemu folder there is a batch file called "run.bat"

which has the single line

bin\qemu-system-arm.exe -M versatilepb -cpu arm1136-r2 -hda debian6-19-04-2012.img -kernel zImage_3.1.9 -m 192 -append "root=/dev/sda2"

edit the "run.bat" file in notepad and add "-k [keymap]" where keymap is the file name of your preferred keymap in the keymaps folder, as shown in the following examples..

For English US keyboard layout

bin\qemu-system-arm.exe -k en-us -M versatilepb -cpu arm1136-r2 -hda debian6-19-04-2012.img -kernel zImage_3.1.9 -m 192 -append "root=/dev/sda2"

For Italian keyboard layout

bin\qemu-system-arm.exe -k it -M versatilepb -cpu arm1136-r2 -hda debian6-19-04-2012.img -kernel zImage_3.1.9 -m 192 -append "root=/dev/sda2"

For Lithuanian keyboard layout

bin\qemu-system-arm.exe -k lt -M versatilepb -cpu arm1136-r2 -hda debian6-19-04-2012.img -kernel zImage_3.1.9 -m 192 -append "root=/dev/sda2"




I haven't tested this yet but will later once I get on a windows computer again. For now though it is a most glorious sunny morning here so I will off outside for the day!

[dussel]

@mjlally: My run.bat looks like this:

binqemu-system-arm.exe -k de -M versatilepb -cpu arm1136-r2 -hda debian6-19-04-2012.img -kernel zImage_3.1.9 -m 192 -append "root=/dev/sda2"

But if I try to start, it only says in bin/stderr.txt:Could not read keymap file: 'de' If I try it without the additional "-k de" parameter it runs fine. @allIs it possible to adjust the resolution of the screen qemu is emulating?

[DuncanKennedy]

Ok - I"m running the Debian package. In order to get the keyboard fixes I used

sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration
sudo shutdown -r now

Once it rebooted my problem was resolved.

Duncan

[DuncanKennedy]

Ok - on getting a better resolution in Qemu, I haven't found a working direct answer - however if you follow the instructions in;

http://www.raspberrypi.org/for.....vnc-server

This will walk you through setting up a vnc server (tight vnc) on the RPi and configuring it to support a 1920x1080 desktop, which works beautifully!

Note that for this to work, you have to have networking installed and running with a real ip address on your local network.

Duncan

[mjlally]

Thanks Duncan.

Your keyboard fix seems to be the easiest way around it.

Haven't had a chance to look at resolution yet.

[Kphillis]

I gave some locale configuration a try, and it still resists fixing my keyboard layout... Anyways, Here's a step by step I tried:

Code: Select all

step 1) Run the Virtual machine, and login.
step 2) Run the following command
sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

step 3) Find the Locale you have, and in my case, I scrolled down and pressed space on
"en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8"
"en_US ISO-8859-1"

step 4) Press return, this list should be short, and for this list, Select the new entries.

step 5) press return after you select the default locale.

step 6) Be patient... This step can take a while, but let the Locales be regenerated.

step 7) Run the following command:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration

step 8) select the appropriate keyboard. Most users can get away with selecting "Generic 105-key (intl) PC" for most modern desktop computers.

step 9) Select the setting in the list if your lucky... If not select "Other".

step 10) select your country. In my case I will use "USA"
step 11) Now select your keyboard Layout. Most generic Keyboards in the United states use USA.
step 12) This step is asking about what modifications to the Function keys are made... In this case I recommend selecting "The default for the keyboard layout" option if you have no idea as to what these mean.
step 13) This step is asking about the Combination keys... Generally this can be left alone safely.
step 14) This step asks if you want to terminate the xserver. For the most part I would just click OK.

step 15) test the keyboard settings a bit... If they do not work, redo steps 7 to 14.

step 16) if this still does not fix the problem, shutdown the system with, and procede to steps 17 to 20.
sudo shutdown -h now

step 17) Open up the run.bat file in the main folder for qemu, and look for the line that says: ( if the file does not have this line, you got the wrong folder )

bin\qemu-system-arm.exe -M versatilepb -cpu arm1136-r2 -hda debian6-19-04-2012.img -kernel zImage_3.1.9 -m 192 -append "root=/dev/sda2"

step 18) add the region specific keymap setting to the list of arguments... In my case I add the following at the end:

-L . -k en-us 

step 19) After saving the Run.bat changes, the line should look somethin like this:

bin\qemu-system-arm.exe -M versatilepb -cpu arm1136-r2 -hda debian6-19-04-2012.img -kernel zImage_3.1.9 -m 192 -append "root=/dev/sda2" -L . -k en-us 

step 20) restart from step 1, and skip steps 2 through 6 ( these should be fine )

[ScoobyDoo]

Thanks, works perfectly on windows 7 64bit.
I've managed to test out some packages that i wish to use when my pi arrives and they are installing and working
Great

[Joe Schmoe]

Just out of curiosity, why do you have to change the QEMU command line (adding the -L and -k options)? I.e., if it was working OK inside the emulation (once you did the various dpkg reconfigure thingies), why would you need to exit, change the command line, and re-run QEMU?

In any case, it worked fine for me, once I made the changes inside the image - I didn't have to add those options to the command line.

[Vindicator]

The last 3 steps were if the previous way did not work.

[Kphillis]

Just out of curiosity, why do you have to change the QEMU command line (adding the -L and -k options)? I.e., if it was working OK inside the emulation (once you did the various dpkg reconfigure thingies), why would you need to exit, change the command line, and re-run QEMU?

In any case, it worked fine for me, once I made the changes inside the image - I didn't have to add those options to the command line.

The -L option changes the directory qemu searches for keymaps, and other elements in. As for the -k option, that changes the keyboard. Also, the last steps where in case the first set of steps did not work. It's not always guaranteed that things will fix without changing the settings of qemu itself.

The last 3 steps were if the previous way did not work.

That's Correct. Also, the last 3 steps could mean the difference between having he keyboard replace "|" with "#", and also, I might also want to recommend looking at the pc104 keyboard too.

[mjlally]

Just out of curiosity, why do you have to change the QEMU command line (adding the -L and -k options)?

Hi Joe, from my perspective it would be better if I could resolve the keyboard problem at the QEMU side of things, I could just have several different .bat files, one for each keyboard layout, which end users could download depending on the keyboard they needed. I'd like to keep it as simple and straightforward to use as possible.

[n3tw0rk5]

Quick question, why is the virtual ram set to 192mb? Is this to mimic the cpu/gpu ram split or does it need to be 256mb to match the RasPi?

[mjlally]

Quick question, why is the virtual ram set to 192mb? Is this to mimic the cpu/gpu ram split or does it need to be 256mb to match the RasPi?

Hi there, as far as I am aware, the default cpu/gpu split on the model B is 192/64 but I haven't got a real RPi to play with yet so I don't know for sure if that is actually the case..

[guachinver]

I'm an absolute beginer with Debian, Qemu, and Raspberry pi
Suiving the instructions of this thread for obtain a good Keymap I have had a 90% of successful, Windows Vista Spanish and spanish keyboard. Thanks a lot I'll try to remap 6 bad keys.
Another problem:
When, from the console run startx, the graphic windows load but I lose the mouse control and obtain an annoying message:

"QEMU - Pres Ctrl-Alt to exit muse grab"

Yes, pressing Ctrl-Alt the mouse is now controlled,for windows vista, but when you clic on emulation window the cursor mouse go to top left of emulator window with losted control- The message appears.
Please, some idea?