[Quantian-general] Re: Quantian in VMware Player with disk access

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

Reposting: as alioth was down yesterday and today, this may have gotten lost.

Cheers, Dirk

On 31 December 2005 at 15:04, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
| 
| I just posted the text below on my blog -- I'd love to hear from anyone who
| is trying this on Windows if/how well it goes.
| 
| Cheers, Dirk
| 
| 
|    Quantian in VMWare Player: Create a virtual disk with qemu
| 
|    A few days ago, I blogged about [1]booting/running the Quantian iso
|    via VMware Player, a 'free as in beer' virtualization tool.
| 
|    Over the last few days, I have experimented a little more, perused the
|    [2]VMware Player Forum and googled a bit. It turns out that you can
|    employ the 'free as in speech' virtualization tool [3]qemu (using
|    version 0.7.2 from Debian unstable is fine, looks like a newer 0.8.0
|    it out upstream) to create a virtual disk image in vmdk format
|    suitable for VMware. For example, the command
| 
|      qemu-img create -f vmdk Quantian.vmdk 512M
| 
|    creates a 512mb file of the given name in the in required vmdb format.
|    By the way, qemu is smart and creates a much smaller file -- an
|    'empty' 512mb partition occupies only 12mb.
| 
|    It is then only a matter of updating the [4]previously posted
|    Quantian.vmx file to add the 'new disk'. I.e. instead of defining just
|    one ide device, we now use two as per
| 
|      # CDROM Info
|      ide0:0.present = "TRUE"
|      ide0:0.fileName = "quantian_0.7.9.1.iso"
|      ide0:0.deviceType = "cdrom-image"
|      # edd 31 Dec 2005 adding a virtual disk file
|      ide1:0.present = "TRUE"
|      ide1:0.filename = "Quantian.vmdk"
|      ide1:0.redo = ""
|      ide1:0.deviceType = "ata-hardDisk"
| 
|    On the next reboot, Quantian will display a disk symbol for hdc. It it
|    then a matter of starting a root shell in Quantian, running cfdisk or
|    fdisk to partition the new "empty" disk drive and to add a /dev/hdc1
|    partition (or more), running mke2fs -j dev/hdc1 to add a filesystem
|    --- and on a subsequent reboot, the disk is ready for use.
| 
|    It should thus be possible to create a suitable disk file of, say, ten
|    or so gigabytes (given that Quantian expands to around seven gigs),
|    create a filesystem and then run knx2hd to install Quantian onto the
|    new virtual disk, make the disk bootable and, presto!, have a virtual
|    instance of Quantian on stateful read/write media. While my tests have
|    been limited to using a Linux host, this procedure should work just
|    the same way in Windows.
| 
|    Oh, and as it's still early afternoon here: Best wishes for 2006 to
|    everyone!
| 
| References
| 
|   1. http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/computers/linux/debian/quantix/quantian_via_vmware_player.html
|   2. http://www.vmware.com/community/forum.jspa?forumID=123
|   3. http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/
|   4. http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/computers/linux/debian/quantix/Quantian.vmx
| 
| 
| -- 
| Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something. 
|                                                   -- Thomas A. Edison

-- 
Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something. 
                                                  -- Thomas A. Edison