Ubuntu 5.10 Preview LiveCD from within QEMU

I've read umpteen reviews of various distros on various sites and always wanted to write one myself. But burning a CD just to try out a distro is not my cup of tea. First of all it seems ecologically unfriendly that people keep burning CDs for a small stuff and later they won't use it (except for may be Tea-coaster. But how many coasters do you really need ?) Other reason is I know I won't using a distro unless I really really like it. So I prefer LiveCD distros anyday, over the install-and-see-if-you-like breed.

So when I discovered QEMU few days ago, it was best things since sliced bread :)
So now I can try any LiveCD without having to burn a copy. Coming back to Ubuntu 5.10 Preview, Here is what I discovered.

About Ubuntu 5.10 Preview LiveCD
As the name suggests, this is still a preview so expect some bugs to be there. The help screen shows the Date/Time Stamp of this image as " built on 20050317ubuntu15". This should give you some idea about which preview release this might be if you are comparing against subsequent preview releases.

Booting and Setup
Initial bootup seems faster compared to 5.04 version.
During the bootup/setup process, when I selected "India" as location, it went into loop of choose language/choose location.
When I selected default United States as location, it went ahead with hardware detection part.

Later I got error on the console, although it seems harmless:

Bummer, could not run '/sbin/debian-installer' : No such file or directory

Later part of setup/install is graphical with message in graphics font and a small progress bar below the "ubuntu" logo. The choice of the colour of the font is weird, since it is difficult to read on black console background. White text message on black are easy to on eyse, compared to brown colour which is default for ubuntu.

More about Ubuntu 5.10 Preview later ....

Read more!

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. Read more!