HOW-TO: QEMU

There are many  popular virtualization software in the wild  such as virtual box, vmware, etc. But there is another virtualization software native to linux and is opensource that is Qemu. It can also emulate hardware level virtualization.
To install qemu run the following command

apt-get install qemu

make sure you install qemu-system-gui otherwise you will be left without GUI and you will only see

VNC server started at 127.0.0.1:5869

make sure you also installed libsdl-dev and libconsole packages. If you don't want to have GUI then uninstall qemu-system-gui package and install gvncviewer.

apt-get install gvncviewer

To run gvncviewer use the following command

/usr/bin/gvncviewer localhost ::1:5869

First we need  to create a virtual hard disk  file. The native format for qemu is a raw file but if you have more disk space then it is recommended to use qcow2 format to create a virtual image we use the qemu-img command.

qemu-img create -f qcow2 hd.qcow2 1G

if you use .img for your image qemu will give warning about explicitly specifying a format.
-f qcow2 says create a  image with the format qcow2
1G says the file must of size 1 GB

To run your virtual os if your system is 32 bit then run qemu-system-i386 and  if it's 64 bit then run qemu-system-x86_64

For example to run freedos

qemu-system-i386 -m 512 -cpu host -enable-kvm -hda hd.cow2  -cdrom freedos.iso -boot order=d

-m 512: use ram of 512 MB
-cpu host: Emulate host cpu
-boot order=d: boot from cdrom

After you have installed your virtual os run

qemu-system-i386 -m 512 -cpu host -enable-kvm hd.qcow2

That's it you can now use your virtual os.