One thing I hate at work is waiting for something that has an unknown life span, to finish.
The task may take a few minutes, but it is never long enough to start another task.
I rediscovered
QEMU again the other day and set about installing
Damn Small linux DSL) as my guest OS within windows XP.
You can get QEMU for windows
here and the latest DSL cd image from
here
You can then just run QEMU booting from the image as if it was a CD, but I wanted a hard disk image that I could install DSL to.
To boot with just the CD image use
qemu.exe -L . -cdrom cdromimage.iso -m 256 -boot d
and to build a hard disk image and then boot it use
qemu-img.exe create -f qcow hda.img 3G
qemu.exe -L . -hda hda.img -m 256
but a new hard disk image is unbootable to I did both
qemu.exe -L . -cdrom cdromimage.iso -hda hda.img -m 256 -boot d
and then installed DSL on to the hard disk image.
I found that I wanted the
linux window to be small so I ran DSL with
fb800x600
or
fb800x600 2
to go straight to the console without loading X windows.
When asked about your mouse type, say PS2 even if its USB and do not expect ping to work, though firefox connected to the internet fine (once I had setup the proxy settings).
Then once everything is setup you can use the QEMU monitor via CTRL+ALT+2 and save the virtual machine and then restore later, no need to wait for it to boot up ever again.
Most of the documentation is oriented towards running window inside
linux but there are links to pages with more
linux in windows information.