unfrozen repo somewhere?

Chris Adams cmadams at hiwaay.net
Mon Sep 29 21:59:17 UTC 2008


Once upon a time, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> said:
> So far I haven't seen anything in release notes that looks anywhere near 
> as convenient as downloading a ready to run vmware image.  The process 
> to create a bootable USB looks like it requires a already-installed 
> system, and I don't see any estimate of the disk space and time it will 
> waste to do the 'install to hard drive' in a VM to get a writable 
> system.   I've also always had to track down hacks to make vmware tools 
> work when I wanted to run fedora under vmware - is that still a problem?

With qemu/qemu-kvm, you can download and run the LiveCD ISO image with
"-cdrom /path/to/image.iso -boot d".  If vmware makes it harder than
that, then I'd say you should give an Open Source virtualization tool a
try.

If you really want to make a disk image to run from, you can set up an
empty disk image file (allow several gig, but the qemu qcow2 image type
only uses more-or-less what you use under the virtual image, so you can
allow 10G or more and let it grow on demand), boot the ISO image, and
transfer to the disk image.  That isn't but a couple of extra steps and
a few minutes of work (since you don't have to wait for CD/DVD seeks).
The only "wasted" space is the ISO image (and if 700M is too much space
for you, you probably don't have enough free space to run the virtual
image anyway).

So:

qemu-img create -f qcow2 liveinst.img 10G
sudo qemu-kvm -m 1024 -hda liveinst.img -cdrom /path/to/livecd.iso -boot d
[click "transfer to disk" and shut down]
rm /path/to/livecd.iso # (if space is at a premium)
sudo qemu-kvm -m 1024 -hda liveinst.img

-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.




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