 Before I started this channel I could probably count on one hand the number of virtual machines that I've ever created at that point In fact, I think I'd probably only done it one time on a personal machine And it's just not something that I ever really had reason to do whenever I wanted to test a Linux distribution I blew away my hard drive and just installed the damn thing It wasn't necessarily the best thing to always do but it's just what I did It seemed to make more sense for me to test a Linux distribution on actual hardware to see if it would work And then if it didn't go distro hopping again, but once I started the channel and started doing distro reviews I had to actually start learning how to use virtual machines And the first stop on that journey was virtual box and virtual box is a great piece of software It is a little outdated, but it's constantly maintained at least and it still works really really well But it's also quite buggy in some situations So I moved on to a piece of software in the last few weeks called VIRTManager Which uses underlying virtualization technologies to basically do what virtual box does but better And VIRTManager is where I'm at right now, it's actually a very good piece of software and I plan on continuing to use it But over the last couple days I've been watching a lot of Martin Wimpris' streams on Twitch And he's been working on a program that he developed called Quick Emu And this is a terminal based program, by default at least, that will allow you to create virtual machines very easily Now just watching some of his stream made me think, wow, that's really cool, and I want to try that So I did, and that's what we're going to talk about today So we're going to be talking about Quick Emu, which I can't say for whatever reason And we're going to talk about Quick GUI, which is the GUI friend and that has been developed for Quick Emu So let's go ahead and jump in So the first thing we're going to do is take a look at the GitHub repository for Quick Emu And that's what this looks like here, and there's not a lot to this page at all There's some documentation and there's a list of requirements and stuff like that And we'll talk about that here in a minute when I talk about installation But for the most part, it shows you how to use it and that's basically it There are a few exceptions to that where it gets to how to install things like macOS Because there's some certain things that you have to do in order to get macOS actually working But other than that, it gives you a list of the operating systems that it supports out of the box And how to install it, that's basically it Now, all that being said, it's actually fairly easy So the first thing you want to do if you want to install this thing Is go through this long list of actual requirements Now most of the stuff I found that I already had installed So for example, I have Bash installed, most people are going to have Core Utils installed They're using some weird Linux distro that didn't come with them As far as I know, every Linux distribution that I've ever used comes with Core Utils installed already EDK was installed, grep was there, JQ was already installed There was maybe four of these out of the whole thing that I had to install myself And they were all in AUR, except for a couple of them Mac recovery, not there, but that actually gets downloaded with the Git repository So don't worry about that There's one here called MKIS-OFS, which isn't in the AUR But it's part of a larger package called CDR Tools, which is in the AUR So that took a little bit of finagling to try to figure out what they mean there Because they really should list that as CDR Tools But maybe just this one package is available on Ubuntu Because this is probably originally meant to be run on Ubuntu But if you're looking on Arch, at least, that package you won't find You'll have to install the bigger package Once you get through all of the requirements, what you need to do then is to go up here And click the code button and copy this URL Go to a terminal, type in git clone, paste that URL, and hit enter And then it'll go through and clone that repository, CD into quick emu And then that's basically all there, all you have to do then is actually run it And what this is, is basically, as far as I'm aware, two different scripts that you can use in order to create virtual machines And they're basically bash scripts, as far as I know Now we can actually vim into one of them So let's vim into quick get And I'll explain what this is in a minute So this is actually a bash script And it is a big bash script, to be sure And it does a lot of stuff So basically what quick get does, is if we run this thing So dot slash quick get And then click enter, you're gonna get an error You need to specify the operating system you want to download So in this case, let's go ahead and download Ubuntu Let's just download Ubuntu, so we just type in Ubuntu Ubuntu And you're gonna get another error And now we need to specify the release So if you already knew all this to begin with You can just go and type it out, you wanna get the errors But if we go and do this again And we wanna download We wanna download 21.10 So we type in 21.10 And enter And then it's gonna go through and actually download that ISO So I'm gonna go ahead and let this do that And I'll cut the video and come back when it's done downloading Okay, once the ISO is done downloading Quick email will go through and give you a command that you need to run In order to start the VM Now, one thing you should know is that if you're in a tiling window manager This is not going to work out well for you right out of the box I highly recommend going through and creating a rule of some kind Depending on what window manager you're in To have all virtual machines that are created by quick email Come up as floating Simply because it looks better and resizing the window After the fact, sometimes it doesn't work out all that well Just keep that in mind if you have to resize the window Sometimes the graphics gets kind of funny So give this a copy, so Ctrl-Shift-C And then do dot slash because we're running a script again And then paste that in, so Ctrl-Shift-V And then hit enter You're gonna get a little pop-up here Now again, I've gone through and created a rule That will make this floating so that it looks like this And then I'm gonna go ahead and move this Sometimes you have to use a modifier key in order to move In a tiling window manager If you're using just this type of environment You'll have like a header bar up there Where you can grab and move things around I don't have that because I'm in a tiling window manager obviously So we're gonna go ahead and install Ubuntu Or run through a quick install Make sure the keyboard works, which it does Continue Normal installation is fine Don't need to download, we'll do that Continue And then that's fine And continue again Detroit is fine Enter our credentials And then continue again And then we'll wait for it to install I'll cut again here And then we'll come back when it comes through And actually reboots itself Okay, now that that's done We're gonna go ahead and restart this Enter our password Which is very strong and complicated And then we're in Ubuntu It's here, right? We can go through and Finish the walkup screen, hit done Change the wallpaper because that's the first thing You should absolutely do Whenever you use Ubuntu Just change it to whatever It really doesn't matter that other I can't stand that orange I just, I can't stand it But that's beside the point This is Ubuntu, you go through You can make changes You can save things It will actually remember everything you do Because there's actually a disk behind this So if we open up GNOME disks here We can actually going to see We've got a 17 gigabyte hard disk Which is actually probably about 18 gigabytes I'd say Probably because there's like a small EFI partition I believe And then, so that's what you have In order to save stuff And so on Now I'm not sure if you can go through And make it so that that's bigger or not I have no clue how you'd go about doing that Yeah, I haven't used this that long But I'm assuming that there's probably a way to do it There's probably a configuration of how to do it I did not see documentation on how to do that yet Like I said, I haven't searched that out I will go ahead and say That there's a few things that you should keep in mind So I'm going to go ahead and power this off And I'm going to show you another VM here So I've gone through and started a Windows VM here And gone through the installation process and everything And there's a few things that I think that you should know About Quick Emu First of all, Windows at least Does not like to be resized So if you don't have this full screen by default Which there is a full screen flag With Quick Emu If you don't have this done like this And you want to go through and resize it Things get janky real fast I'm assuming that that is a Windows problem Windows sucks So just keep that in mind as you go along I will also say that it is not as speedy As that Ubuntu VM that we just were in Is you can see that sometimes there are Visual quirks to the thing So if we go through and try to drag things around You can see that there's two cursors on the screen There as you drag things around That's not anything to do with Quick Emu I'm assuming that's more to do with Windows being godawful But the point is that you can go through And install things like Windows and macOS And it will actually work Now macOS is a little bit different There are instructions on that GitHub page That will go through and tell you How you need to go through and install macOS But Windows installed perfectly fine Another thing that you should keep in mind Is that when you have a VM running It's going to use up all of the memory That is allocated to that VM On your actual host system So for example this here If I open up task manager And go to performance They gave you this VM 16 gigabytes of RAM Now I'm assuming that there's some kind of Like ratio that it's going to give you It's going to give the VM a certain percentage Of the RAM and because I have 64 gigabytes Of RAM it gave it a certain portion of that But it's using if you look up here At the top my system now is using 27.92 gigabytes of RAM total Which is absurd Now I also have OBS running And a lot of other stuff So that's not all this But it's going to use a significant amount Of RAM to run this VM That's one thing that I noticed That this does where it doesn't really Do that so much with virtual box Finally there is a GUI front end For quick emu that you can actually use It's called quick GUI and it is in the AUR And I believe it's probably Available in the Ubuntu repository as well You can download this and then you can go through And instead of using the terminal To create virtual machines You can go through and use the GUI version So just first select the operating system So these are the operating systems that are available So I'm going to select Arch Linux You can choose the latest That's probably all it's available And then you can click download And then it will go through and download it Like you would in the terminal Which is what I showed you But instead you're using a GUI And honestly I would say That the GUI is probably the preferred way Of doing it simply because If you notice there at the beginning When I selected create new VM Or whatever it was On the other side there was Managed existing virtual machines And it will actually go through And allow you to select the folder That you have quick emu installed on And that's where all of your Virtual machines are stored And you can actually go through And manage those right from the GUI It's easier to do it in the GUI Than it is in the terminal At least probably for most people So that is really all quick emu does Now there is a way for you To go through and use a ISO That is not a part of the Quick get system So that area where you go through And select the distro And the release and the addition that you want That's only going to cover A certain portion of Linux distributions Out there If you come across one that's not supported You can go through and download a Linux Image and create a VM configuration For it You just follow these instructions here Again I will link to this page In the video description And you can create one just like that It's not hard and it works fine Now the only downside I've seen With this is that there doesn't appear To be a way to manage The video RAM that is available For the virtual machine Something like virtual box You can go through and give it a certain amount of VRAM I haven't found a way to do that So far with quick emu Now there might be a way And I just haven't got there yet So just keep that in mind But I would like to be able to say Like that Windows VM It has 16 gigabytes of RAM Let me give it a gigabyte of VRAM So that things run a little bit smoothly If that makes sense That would be so cool And that would be definitely something That is a lot harder On other virtual machine managers Because like with virtual box You can only give up to 256 megabytes If this allowed you to do more than that That'd be way awesome Because it would allow you to do more things So that is quick emu And it is really cool I love the fact That you can go through And install things like macOS and Windows here I also saw options for A couple of the BSDs that are here I know that they're working on freeDOS So the fact that they're developing this And adding more options for being able To install things through QuickGet Is just kind of amazing And the thing about Especially Windows Is that Windows is kind of a pain in the butt To actually install with things like virtual box It's not an easy process It's not necessarily hard But there are quirks And a lot of times it doesn't work all that well Unless you know absolutely what you're doing This is astonishingly simple And even an idiot like me can do it So that is quick emu All the links for this stuff Will be in the video description If you have comments on this stuff You can leave the comments in the comments section below You can follow me on Twitter At Linuxcast You can support me on Patreon At patreon.com Slash Linuxcast Before I go I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons Today, Devon, Patrick, I'm Marcus, Meg, Glen, Jax And I can tool Steve, Ace, Sebrega, Linux, Garrett Mitchell, Arch, Sinner, Carbonated Jeremy, Sean, Odin, Martin, E, AndyP Merrick, Camp, Joshua, Lee, Devon, Peter, A Crucible, Dark, Win, Six, Vlad A, and Primus Thanks everybody for watching I'll see you next time