Table of contents
Description
I had all these ISO's on my pc's drive, for when I burn new cd's. They are for Knoppix, Puppy Linux, Damn Small Linux, and a few assorted others. When Im in new places, I often burn a new cd, and give it to someone to explore, but that was pretty much the extent of the usefulness. Until I read the article in Linux Pro Magazine last month. They covered the Qemu product I have heard about for years, but using it in a new way. This time, they were using it like a portable app, and thats cool. That means no install footprint in the registry, and no trace - which helps for some company security policies. But even better, it means it can run off a USB drive as well. So in essence, its now allowing you to carry a usb stick - say 4Gb in size, load a bunch of ISO's, the Qemu portable app - and use the distro of your choice, wherever you are, no worries - because it doesnt touch the PC's hard drive.
Note : please see the bottom of the page for the full size images - these are just thumbnails in the actual documentation. Clicking on the image name will give full size view to the options.
Process/Implementation
Like so many other recent projects I've been working on - there
are actually very few steps to get this going. Once again, its bascially
download, configure, and use. So without further ado, here are the
steps :
- Download the Qemu Application. (note there is much more info about it at http://www.davereyn.co.uk
- Extract the zip somewhere - I chose my local c:\apps\qemu_manager_50 directory but this could just as easily be the network share, or the usb drive
- Launch the extracted c:\apps\qemu_manager_50\QemuManager.exe (or wherever you extracted yours)
- Go through the "First Run" wizard :
- After doing that, you'll see the native screen that you get in the Qemu Manager - ours has no VM's yet though :
- At this point, click the "+" button in the tool bar to add a new virtual machine - it will present you with a screen that allows you to set some data about your new VM. Im using Puppy 2.15 in this case, Linux type of O/S, 192Mb RAM (its on my T23 laptop with small memory amount), and drive size which I use a small amount for since its all ISO based. Keep defaults for the rest - at least thats what I do :
- Now you have a basic definition for the new VM. It should look similar to this :
- At this point, you're looking at the "Hardware" tab on the right side of that window. Click the next tab for "Drives" and we'll configure the ISO and some other properties. When you begin, it looks like this :
- So what we need to do is to fill in the location of the ISO and set it to boot from cdrom. In this example, just for illustration and documentation purposes, I have used the ISO image stored on my NAS drive - which is rediculous to truly do because it would have to pull the entire ISO image over the lan every time you want to use it - normally you'd have it stored locally - but again, T23 doesnt have the space either ....
- Launch it by clicking the green ">" play button.
Tuning / Customization
From
that point, its all very straightforward. Granted I havent done too much with it yet, so I cant really say about the drive size I chose. The first VM I used 2Gb, but it was a waste. Then I did 1Gb, and still - doenst store anything. So I've yet to figure out the formatting of that drive space, and how to save settings - look for future updates.
Note that I used Puppy Linux 2.15 in my example here, but you could use just about any ISO. I have so far tested with any of the following and *so* much more - however, with respect to DSL, my personal experience is with 3.01 not 4.3.
- Puppy 2.14 - ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distribu...ulldrivers.iso
- Puppy 2.15 - ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distribu...15CE-Final.iso
- Puppy 2.17 - ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distribu...ulldrivers.iso
- Puppy 3.01 - ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distribu...-seamonkey.iso (I like this one best)
Damn Small Linux :
- DSL 4.3 (syslinux) - http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/...3-syslinux.iso
- DSL 4.3 (initrd) - http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/...4.3-initrd.iso
- DSL 4.3 (basic) - http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/...nt/dsl-4.3.iso
- DSL 3.01 (syslinux) - http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/...1-syslinux.iso
- DSL 3.01 (non-syslinux) - http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/.../dsl-3.0.1.iso
- DSL Archives - http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/...small/archive/
Knoppix :
Remember that you could use Fedora, Suse, Ubuntu, and any of the other major distros that now ship live cd's as well - edubuntu, slax - the options are virtually limitless.
- Tag page
- What links here
Images 6
