DapperQemuInstall

Installing Dapper in Breezy with Qemu

Rationale

I only own a single laptop and don't have a machine (or extra hard drive partition) that I want to use to install the latest testing version of ubuntu (dapper). I also don't won't to upgrade because I need a stable machine for school and cannot deal with much unplanned downtime. The solution I came up with was to run dapper in an emulated environment. This should be familiar to those of you who have used Virtual PC or VMware. I chose Qemu, an open source emulation program. This allows me to test a build of dapper without disturbing my system. It runs in a window or fullscreen on top of a breezy. There is a minor performance penalty but the kqemu acceleration minimizes this by providing a virtualization layer.

Preparation

Install Qemu

You need to install Qemu on a Breezy computer. You can use the slightly outdated breezy package: qemu (see InstallingSoftware).

This should be fine unless you want hardware accelerated virtualization (kqemu). To do this we need to compile from source. If you have installed the breezy packages you need to remove them.

Get the source

Download from the qemu website

wget http://qemu.org/qemu-0.8.0.tar.gz

wget http://qemu.org/kqemu-0.7.2.tar.gz

Extract the source with

You might want to do this in a directory like /tmp

tar zxvf qemu-0.8.0.tar.gz

kqemu needs be extracted in the same folder as qemu

tar zxvf kqemu-0.7.2.tar.gz qemu-0.8.0

Edit configure

Edit the lines that say cc="gcc" and host_cc="gcc" so that is reads

cc="gcc-3.4"
host_cc="gcc-3.4"

Make sure you have gcc 3.4 on your computer if not, sudo apt-get install gcc-3.4 Edit the lines that says kernel_path="" so that it reads

kernel_path="/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.12-10-686/"

Kernel Headers

Download the kernel headers (or source) that corresponds to the kernel you run, it will probably be either 2.6.12-10-686 or 2.6.12-10-386

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.12-10-686

Compile

To compile

./configure
make

To install

I like to keep my system clean by using only programs packaged in debs, for easy removal and other reasons. I use checkinstall to generated a .deb that will automatically be installed.

sudo apt-get install checkinstall

Generate a deb with

checkinstall

When prompted describe Qemu, edit the name so that is reads qemu.

Load Module

Load the kqemu module with

sudo modprobe kqemu

Download a dapper iso cdrom image

You should probably use a torrent, but do the following to download from a mirror.

wget http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/dapper/flight-3/dapper-install-i386.iso

You might want to check to md5sum to verify integrity.

Run Qemu

Create a disk image

This is the file that will act as the virtual hard drive for the installation

qemu-img create dapper.img 4G

You can specify whatever size you want, qemu should dynamically resize the image as it grows, on your hardisk, but the dapper install will see whatever size disk you create.

Run the Install

qemu -boot d -cdrom dapper-install-i386.iso -m 256 -hda dapper.img

where -m is the megs of memory you wish to allow the install to use

Follow the instructions of the curses based installer, it should take a bit longer in some bits of the install and shorter in others than a normal hd install.

Boot into Dapper

run:

qemu -boot c -m 256 -hda dapper.img

Conclusions

This process can be used to test most GNU/linux (or other OS) distro's that provide iso install images. It is great to sandbox unstable development versions before migrating your systems. There is little advantage to doing this if all you need is the ability use a live cd and check out dapper. If, however you want the room to customize dapper is a safe way that allows you to save modifications and run without a reboot, then this a great tool.

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