Building a QEMU virtual environment

Submitted by Chris Lale on 9 January, 2009 - 20:25

It's great running Puppy Linux from a USB stick but you do have to keep rebooting your system. QEMU allows you to create a virtual system in which you can run Puppy (or anything else) in a window on your normal system. I find it useful for experimenting with Puppy while still being able to use my computer for other tasks at the same time. QEMU is available for a number of platforms including MS Windows, but I am running it on my Debian GNU/Linux system. Virtualbox is an alternative, but some features (eg access to USB ports) is not available in the Free version.

My plan is to create a virtual system with three partitions.

  1. A linux partition formatted with the ext3 filesystem for a full hard disc installation of Puppy Linux. A full hard disk installation is not possible on a QEMU FAT16 partition.
  2. An MSDOS partition formatted with a FAT16 filesystem (as used by most USB sticks) for a frugal installation of Puppy Linux. The settings files in this installation can be managed from the full hard disc installation.
  3. A Linux swap partition which should help to speed up both Puppy installations. Note: it would not be a good idea to put a swap partition on a USB memory stick because of the high level of rewriting to the stick.

The full hard disc installation of Puppy 4.1 takes around 260 MiB, so the ext3 partition should be larger than this. The swap partition should be around 0.5 -1 times the memory allocated to the QEMU virtual machine. Most of the experimentation will take place in the frugal installation. It will need plenty of room for .sfs files (the basic pup_412.sfs file is 92MiB) and .2fs save files (anything from 32MiB upwards). The maximum size for this partition allowed by the FAT16 file system is 4MB. My virtual hard disc will look something like this:

QEMU partitions