How to do it...

Perform the following steps to install QEMU from packages on Ubuntu/Debian and RHEL/CentOS distributions:

1. On Ubuntu/Debian distributions, update your packages index:

root@kvm:~# apt-get update

1. Install the package:

root@kvm:~# apt-get install -y qemu

1. On CentOS/RHEL distributions execute: 

root@kvm:~# yum install qemu-kvm

To install from source, execute the following:

1. Download the archive first:

root@kvm:~#cd /usr/src && wget 
http://download.qemu-project.org/qemu-2.8.0.tar.xz

1. Extract the files from the archive:

root@kvm:/usr/src# tar xvJf qemu-2.8.0.tar.xz && cd qemu-        2.8.0

1. Configure and compile the source code:

root@kvm:/usr/src/qemu-2.8.0# ./configure  
root@kvm:/usr/src/qemu-2.8.0# make && make install