And now, for something completely different:
I am using Qemu to boot Ubuntu, from a different partition, inside of Ubuntu. Is this wise? Some suggest it is not, but I like to live on the wild side!
So the relevant code is pretty simple. Recall the last post on initializing Qemu, and take that, flip it around a bit, and here we go:
JUST REMEMBER YOU MAY BE DESTROYING YOUR DRIVE!!!!!
Sorry for that, here we go:
sudo qemu -m 768 -boot c -hda /dev/sda
The sudo bit is used here because apparently it's dangerous to mount the drive you are running. Pfff! The rest is:
qemu: The virtualizing program you are running
-m 768: You can tell Qemu how much memory to set aside. This is megabytes...
-boot c: It will boot from the virtual primary drive, instead of the cd-rom see?
-hda /dev/sda: The primary drive is /dev/sda, which is the drive I am running now
Note:
The command to restart the windows manager in Linux is control+alt+backspace. When you boot Qemu to another Linux and want to kill the windows manager, you can't use that because you will kill the main system you are using... Woops.
Now let me try to restart my extra Ubuntu, it took over five minutes last time...
Meanwhile, let me bore you with a story: I installed a second version of Ubuntu on an extra partition a while back. Thought maybe I could mess around with it and trim it down to nothing. Well, it worked but now I don't have any kind of anything on it. Good thing it was a spare. Okay it's back.
I mean, I messed it up bad. All it has is this:
Anyway, I won't bore you with the rest of the details, I was just noting that you could indeed boot Linux inside of Linux. I think I could even install Qemu on this virtual drive, boot the hard drive, and start Windows... Hold on...
I had to install a window manager, and I didn't want Gnome, so I picked FluxBox. It's the same window manager used in my favorite light-weight-heavy-hitter, DSL. Here I am, installing Qemu on my pretend computer on my pretend drive:
Alright, it just finished. Now to try booting another computer inside it. Instead of trying to kill it with another Ubuntu running, I will boot to my DSL file. Heh heh. Here we go:
The "inner world" Qemu is not handling the graphics very well, I can't even read the text on the screen:
Well, that didn't work very well at all. I don't think I have enough memory to really make this work. DSL finally booted after maybe 15 minutes, but it couldn't hardly load the window manager: It started and stalled, after 5 minutes I shut it down...
Well, anyway, that was fun.
