The LiveCD Forums

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:

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echo "app-emulation/qemu softmmu" >> /etc/portage/package.use
emerge qemu


3. Run Qemu!

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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.

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)

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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:

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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):

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mkfs.ext2 /dev/hda

no you use this image for testing other iso's to run like this

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qemu -boot d -hda livecds.img -cdrom TestLiveCD.iso

The shame is that you can't really test features like hardware detection.