How to install Red Hat 7.3 into a file under QEMU as a regular user.

Bernhard Fischer rep.nop at aon.at
Fri Jan 20 20:19:43 UTC 2006


On Fri, Jan 20, 2006 at 01:45:55PM -0600, Rob Landley wrote:
>Shortly after the new qemu came out, I downloaded the Red Hat 7.2 iso images 
>and installed them into an image file.  I have Red Hat 7.2 running in an 
>800x600 window, so I can test building busybox under it.
>
>For those of you who want to follow along at home, download qemu from:
> http://www.qemu.org/qemu-0.8.0.tar.gz
>and do the standard "./configure; make; make install" dance.  (The only corner 
>case is it needs SDL support in order to fake a graphics card.  You may 
>already have SDL but not the gratuitously separated sdl-devel package...)

If you are not willing to use SDL, then you might enjoy using GGI
instead. See http://members.aon.at/berny_f/qemu/ for a patch to let qemu
display to over a donzen different output-facilities (fbdev, X11, vgagl,
wscon, libsvga, directx, etc, etc) on all major operating systems.

>
>Once qemu is installed, download the Red Hat 7.3 install CDs from:
> ftp://archive.download.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/
>
>Then make a blank 2 gig image file:
> dd if=/dev/zero of=valhalla.img bs=1048576 count=2048
>
>Run qemu with the image file as hda and the install CD as hdd:
> qemu -monitor /dev/stdin -cdrom valhalla-i386-disc1.iso \
>  -hda valhalla.img -boot d
>
>Yes, the above attaches the qemu control console (monitor) to stdio in an 
>extremely impolite way.  When it's done you have to type "reset" at the 
>command prompt and hit enter to unconfuse the pty.  (No, it won't echo back 
>what you type when you do this.)
>
>During the install you'll need to switch to the second cd, and that's what the 
>monitor is for:
> change cdrom valhalla-i386-disc2.iso
>
>Remember to type "reset" and hit enter after qemu exits.
>
>At this point the valhalla.img file is a partitioned hard drive image.  You 
>can run "qemu valhalla.img" and RH 7.3 should come up in a window.  (You 
>probably want to change the screen resolution to something smaller, or stay 
>in text mode.)
>
>What you can't do is trivially loopback mount it to get data (like the busybox 
>source tarball) into and out of it.  (It's not impossible, you just have to 
>use losetup by hand, feeding a calculated offset to -o.  Probably 63 sectors 
>times 512 bytes per sector for the first partition.  But let's not bother 
>right now).
>
>Instead, what we do is create hdb.img (say 256 megs):
> dd if=/dev/zero of=hdb.img bs=65536 count=4096
>
>Format it:
> mke2fs hdb.img
> tune2fs -c 0 -i 0 hdb.img
>
>And then as root go:
> mkdir sub
> mount -o loop hdb.img sub
> cp lots_of_stuff sub
> umount sub
>
>And then run qemu like:
> qemu -hda valhalla.img -hdb hdb.img
>
>And in there you can:
> mount /dev/hdb somewhere
>
>You can also set up a virtual network device so qemu can scp stuff to and from 
>the host machine, but that's left as an exercise for the reader right now. 
>
>As for testing busybox under RH 7.3, the good news is "make allnoconfig" 
>builds.  Not much else right now.  I'll post a workaround next message...
>



More information about the busybox mailing list