Compiling bochs from source

When installing bochs on Ubuntu, a precompiled bochs version including a debugger is intalled. The debugger kicks in with the first instruction when booting from a floppy. Typing continue makes the debugger continue. When debugging with bochs as an emulator, this gets annoying quickly. People report that the -q option turns off the debugger. This did not work for me. The solution for me was to compile bochs from code without enabling the debugger option and again with the debugging option turned on. Using the version without the debugger speeds up development.

Compiling without debugger

Download the bochs source code from http://bochs.sourceforge.net/getcurrent.html
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To download, click the link TAR file containing source code (5061k)

sudo apt-get install libxrandr-dev
sudo apt-get install xorg-dev

Read http://bochs.sourceforge.net/doc/docbook/user/compiling.html

Unzip that downloaded file to a directory
Enter the directory

./configure
make

The folder now contains a bochs executable

Compiling with debugger

Download the bochs source code from http://bochs.sourceforge.net/getcurrent.html
Scroll down
To download, click the link TAR file containing source code (5061k)

sudo apt-get install libxrandr-dev
sudo apt-get install xorg-dev

Read http://bochs.sourceforge.net/doc/docbook/user/compiling.html

Unzip that downloaded file to a directory
Enter the directory

./configure --enable-debugger 
make

The folder now contains a bochs executable

 

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