Qemu: a valid emulation option

In my last post I introduced ReactOS, which is a small operating system resembling Windows. However, I didn't really install it. I could have tried the live cd, but I was too lazy to do a reboot. And it was a great chance to experiment Qemu, which I had discovered recently. Qemu is a process emulator that can boot an operating system inside a window. Much like VMWare.
In the past I found a few other projects doing similar stuff (Bochs and Plex86, for example) but for the first time it worked smoothly out-of-the-box. I tried it with ReactOS and a few linux-based livecds. All of them worked perfectly, even audio and network. Well, perfectly if you don't mind the speed....which is slow. But that is to be expected in this kind of emulators. Tip: be sure to use the Qemu Accelerator module, which makes Qemu a lot faster. Without it, it's too slow to be useful.
Qemu usage is pretty straightforward. It has several command line options, but normally you can go with the simple command (for a livecd): qemu -cdrom /dev/hdb (being hdb your cdrom device).
In conclusion, Qemu is a very good piece of software and probably the best option if you don't want to buy VMWare.