Following the celebration of my 20 years with Linux, I wanted to recreate the moment I installed Ubuntu “Breezy Badger” 5.10 for the first time, and with QEMU it was quite easy to do on my modern Fedora 44 environment of 2026.
Install and Run
First of all I downloaded the install CD for i386 of that old release, still available on the Ubuntu website after all these years.
Once that was done, I proceeded to create a QEMU virtual hard disk to install the OS into:
$ qemu-img create -f qcow2 ubuntu.qcow2 30G
Then, just launch a new virtual machine, booting from the virtual CD-ROM drive first, emulating a gigabyte of RAM, which is a reasonable amount for a computer of 2005:
$ qemu-system-i386 \
-m 1024 \
-cdrom ubuntu-5.10-install-i386.iso \
-drive file=ubuntu.qcow2,format=qcow2 \
-boot d \
-no-reboot
The VM boots, and you’re immediately taken to the installation process. Select your locale and keyboard, and choose the defaults for the graphics card. Enter your desired hostname, timezone, and create a new user for your installation. The whole process takes a while to finish.
Once this is done, the VM shuts down automatically instead of rebooting (thanks to the -no-reboot option) and then you must start it back again, directly from the hard disk this time:
$ qemu-system-i386 \
-m 1024 \
-drive file=ubuntu.qcow2,format=qcow2 \
-boot c \
-full-screen
The operating system boots into a configuration phase, and after a few minutes, voilà! Ubuntu “Breezy Badger” 5.10 on your screen, 21 years later:
The default system includes quite a lot of software, including OpenOffice, Firefox, and whatnot. It was quite an impressive offering, all for free, and immediately compatible with pretty much every personal computer available to the public in 2005. No wonder Ubuntu became so popular back in the day.
PPC Shenanigans
Before reaching this point, I tried unsuccessfully to run the PPC version of Ubuntu Badger, which was the one I installed on my “Snow” iBook G3 21 years ago.
I gave a short description of that machine in an old article on this blog:
The main machine where I have Xubuntu installed is a rather old G3 iBook that I bought in 2002, with only 256 MB of RAM and 30 GB of hard disk. The machine runs like a charm, but of course with GNOME and KDE there’s a lot of swapping. As soon as I installed the Xfce desktop, things went really faster. I can only recommend using Xubuntu in old machines: the base system only takes 90 MB of RAM, and applications load faster than in GNOME or KDE.
Let’s all take a minute to consider that a modern operating system, running very decent software, could run in just 256 MB of RAM. Le sigh.
I first used the qemu-system-ppc command, with the -M mac99,via=pmu argument, to help this old Ubuntu recognize my mouse and keyboard. In particular, the via=pmu argument supposedly is meant to route the input devices through something called the “Power Management Unit”, expected by Ubuntu PPC kernels back in the day. I also tried using the -cpu g3 and the -vga std options in various iterations.
After the installation (which was somewhat successful), I had to boot the VM the -prom-env "boot-device=hd:,\yaboot" -prom-env "boot-args=conf=hd:,\yaboot.conf" arguments, because otherwise the VM defaults to looking for an Apple bootloader… which doesn’t exist in this context for obvious reasons. Instead we ask the VM to boot directly from Yaboot.
But the biggest drawback was that the installer failed to correctly setup the X.org server, and thus no desktop would ever appear on screen. This is without mentioning that QEMU had to translate all PPC instructions to the x86_64 architecture of my laptop, which meant that the whole system was reaaaaaaally sluggish.
So, at the end of the day, the i386 version was perfect for the purposes of memorabilia.
At this point in my laptop I have emulators for MS-DOS, Mac OS System 7.5, FreeDOS, Alpine Linux, and now also Ubuntu 5.10 for 32-bit i386.