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Run a LiveCD on your current OS without rebooting

Share information, new uses, and creative solutions involving LiveCDs

Run a LiveCD on your current OS without rebooting

Postby nick » Tue Mar 08, 2005 1:10 pm

Ok, I just discovered this, and it's really cool and easy to do. It uses Qemu to do the emulation (like VMware, but open source), and allows you to boot ISO files without needing to burn them.

1. Download the ISO file.
For this example, it is at /home/nick/knoppix.iso

2. Install Qemu

Download Windows and Mac versions here: http://www.h7.dion.ne.jp/~qemu-win/

I'm using Gentoo, the commands are:
Code: Select all
echo "app-emulation/qemu softmmu" >> /etc/portage/package.use
emerge qemu


3. Run Qemu!
Code: Select all
qemu -cdrom /home/nick/knoppix.iso -boot d


You'll see a window open and Knoppix start booting. It's a bit slower than actually booting the CD, but still usable.
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nick
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Posts: 327
Joined: Fri Feb 20, 2004 1:35 pm

great

Postby keesj » Fri May 20, 2005 10:39 pm

Yes, qemu saves me lots of frustration burning liveCD's
most live distro's still like some harddisk to store some data.
First create a hard disk image (300M is this case)
Code: Select all
qemu-img create livecds.img 300M

Then start any? liveCD and format your partition
start quemu with a hard disk and a cdrom ,and boot from the cdrom:
Code: Select all
qemu -boot d -hda livecds.img -cdrom install-x86-universal-2005.0.iso

create an ext2 filesystem on that. (That is in the qemu window. NOT ON YOUR REAL HARD DISK):
Code: Select all
mkfs.ext2 /dev/hda


no you use this image for testing other iso's to run like this
Code: Select all
qemu -boot d -hda livecds.img -cdrom TestLiveCD.iso


The shame is that you can't really test features like hardware detection.
keesj
 
Posts: 2
Joined: Fri May 20, 2005 10:16 pm


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