Problems with Qemu

[elch]

[*]USB drives and my USB headset are not mounted automatically. In VirtualBox I was able to do that automatically or with a couple of clicks.

If your USB drive is recognized by Linux, you can allow Qemu direct access to it by using e.g. the -hdb or -hdc parameter. However, this needs to be done before Qemu is started. The only way of doing this during runtime is to use the Qemu console. Press CTRL-Alt-2. Then enter: "usb_add host:<VendorID>:<ProductID>" (you can get the VendorID and ProductID from the command "lsusb").

I haven't used sound myself yet, but according to this page "-soundhw all" should do it. Is your USB headset used as default output in ALSA when you plug it in? Probably you can use PulseAudio to use a different output in Qemu? But I doubt Qemu is PulseAudio-aware.

Can't find a way to use my NTFS disks with Qemu
I've read that I can use the following option:

-hdc fat:rw:/media/mydrive/

(even though it is an NTFS drive), but can't make it work.

You are pointing to the mounted device. I'm not even sure whether you can specify FAT for NTFS devices. Use "fdisk -l" (as root) to get a listing of your disks. Then use e.g. -hdc /dev/sdb. It's best to keep it unmounted while Qemu uses it. Otherwise you might run into data loss if both your Linux system and your virtual machine write on the disk.

According to this thread, you might be right by using FAT for an already-mounted directory. Perhaps you need to be -fda, like in the example they provided:
qemu winxp.img -fda fat:floppy:/my_directory

Can't copy-paste from virtual machine to my Ubuntu or from my Ubuntu to my virtual machine.[/list]

I don't think Qemu supports the X.org clipboard. The only way to solve this is to either enable VNC or Remote Desktop within your virtual machine. VNC is directly supported by Qemu but when you're using Windows XP, I'd rather prefer Remote Desktop because it's faster and more suitable. It's also perfectly supported by Linux (rdesktop).

Hope this helps.