Q The Qemu emulator looks interesting, but it is impossible to get working. It says it needs GCC 3 to compile, and OpenSUSE 10.2 has only GCC 4. Is there any way round this?
A Qemu is one of the very few programs that still fails to compile with GCC 4, but it is unfortunate that distros like OpenSUSE no longer have GCC 3 packages available. It is still possible to install GCC 3 on your computer, either directly from source or by using the RPM packages from Fedora, which are reported to work with OpenSUSE 10.2. However, this is a lot of work for a single program, and there are precompiled packages available. One OpenSUSE 10.2 user has compiled Qemu and made it available from www.hasanen.com/files/linux/qemu.tar.gz. Now there is also a package on SUSE's website. Point your browser at http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/SL-OSS-factory/inst-source/suse/i586 and click on the Qemu file (currently qemu-0.9.0-3.i586.rpm but it may have been updated by the time you read this). When the browser asks what to do with the file, select the option to install it and wait for it to be downloaded and installed (you'll need to give the root password when asked). Alternatively, you can install it from the command line with
su -c "rpm -ihv http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/SL-OSS-factory/inst-source/suse/i586/qemu-0.9.0-3.i586.rpm"
The good news is that newer versions of Qemu are ikely to be compatible with GCC 4.