QEMU

After my previous post, I've been trying to get all the information that I would need to create my own version similar to DevelopGo.

I have already downloaded knoppix 3.9 LiveCD ISO image.
I have got hold of the Remastering Howto , and now all ready to go ahead with my changes.

There are some of the road blocks, although not major ones though. I need a machine with CD Writer, to install knoppix which I'l be remastering. I am planning to do it on my home machine, but I don't have a CD Writer. These days CD-Writers come in very cheap, I'm planning to buy one soon. Then I'll be able to install knoppix and make required changes, and then remaster.

While I was doing this research, I came across an invaluable tool called qemu. This is open source CPU and system emulator. Without going into too many details about QEMU, which I'm sure you can find out from google, what I want to stress is how easy it is to use.
I downloaded qemu windows installer from here. Installation itself is very trivial, just asks for install folder, and then it copies files there. Thats it.
I had couple of LiveCDs burned on CD as well as their ISO images. To boot each ISO image all I had to do was run following command from the command prompt:

qemu.exe -L bios -cdrom //./e: 

Where E: is my CD ROM Drive. I had put the LiveCD in the CDROM and qemu booted from the drive. Similarly instead of using actual CD (which seems a little slower, due to I/O speed of CD drive) I can also point to ISO image directly. like:

qemu.exe -L bios -cdrom D:\download\DamnSmallLinux-1.4.iso

I tried DSL 1.4, Ubuntu 5.04 LiveCD as well as OneBase NetInstaller CD using Qemu. All of them worked very well. Off course, typical to each of these distro, they took less (DSL) or more (ubuntu) time to boot.

One annoying thing I noticed during my experimentation is that when using mouse pointer in ubuntu, qemu goes into what it calls grab mode. Title of the window changes to Press Ctrl+Alt to exit grab I'm not sure if there are any side effects of this (I didn't notice any, during short time I played with qemu) but it is annoying none the less.

Thats all for now, about qemu. I'll continue to post about my progess with free version of DevelopGo, in coming days, and any tools like qemu, that I might encounter.