Install QEMU from source for Netware and other x86 OS compatibility.

I am old school. I started my Netware crusade in 1989 when you had to generate the client from OBJ files. Later Netware 2.2 made things simpler but 3.x was a major leap forward and as far as I am concerned, Netware 4.11 / 4.2 was the zenith of operating systems from Novell. Netware 5.1 was sweet being all IP and stuff and Netware 6.5 just tried to do too much, though very cool! Really wish Novell moved forward with a 64bit OS and a custom boot loader instead of mixing in Linux.

First we need to compile QEMU from source, the Apt-get repository doesn’t quite do the trick. Seems there is a bug in that version that doesn’t allow Netware to run a complete install. Netware was always picky of CPU’s.

My quick notes on compiling QEMU on the Raspberry PI.
If you are installing on a Raspberry PI 4 with 2gb of ram, you are good to go. If you have a Raspberry Pi 3 or 3+ lying around, you can use that too but you will need to setup a larger swap.

sudo nano /etc/dphys-swapfile
Edit the line CONF_SWAPSIZE=100 and change it to CONF_SWAPSIZE=1024 for a 1 gigabyte swapfile. This is mainly needed for compiling.

sudo dphys-swapfile swapoff -- to turn off the swapfile.
sudo dphys-swapfile setup -- to create the new swapfile.
sudo dphys-swapfile swapon -- to turn on the new swapfile.

Install all required libraries:
sudo apt-get install git libglib2.0-dev libfdt-dev libpixman-1-dev zlib1g-dev git-email libaio-dev libbluetooth-dev libbrlapi-dev libbz2-dev libcap-dev libcap-ng-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev libgtk-3-dev libcap-dev libcap-ng-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev libgtk-3-dev librbd-dev librdmacm-dev libsasl2-dev libsdl1.2-dev libseccomp-dev libsnappy-dev libssh2-1-dev libvde-dev libvdeplug-dev libvte-2.91-dev libxen-dev liblzo2-dev valgrind xfslibs-dev libnfs-dev libiscsi-dev ninja-build flex bison

Installation of the requirements will take some time.

Get the latest QEMU Source:
git clone https://git.qemu.org/git/qemu.git

Compile time, This is going to take a while.

cd qemu
git submodule init
git submodule update --recursive
./configure
make -j4

This is going to take a while to find something to do. It took approximately one hour to finish compiling. When it is finished, you will have a clean fresh install of QEMU installed on your PI. Then follow up with the install.

sudo make install

Until then, Peace out.