Okay so I’m no expert at qemu. As a matter of fact I’ve used it twice previous to today, so if you’re interested follow along. The host operating system is an ubuntu hoary box that I’ve upgraded from warty. I think qemu should be an apt-get away and you’ll need an installation iso to complete this tutorial. I used the business card iso, obtained here, which does not contain the base-system. I used the instructions found from Wikipedia. The important bits I used were:
doug@ubuntu:~ $ mkdir qemu doug@ubuntu:~ $ cd qemu doug@ubuntu:~/qemu $ qemu-img create -f qcow c.img 500M Formating 'c.img', fmt=qcow, size=512000 kB doug@ubuntu:~/qemu $ qemu -hda c.img -cdrom linux.iso -boot d -m 128 -localtime warning: could not open /dev/net/tun: no virtual network emulation doug@ubuntu:~/qemu $ ls -lh total 51M -rw-r--r-- 1 doug doug 21M 2005-06-12 14:41 c.img -rw-r--r-- 1 doug doug 31M 2005-06-12 14:15 linux.iso drwxr-xr-- 2 doug doug 4.0K 2005-06-12 14:40 screenshots
The first step is making a directory within which we can work. The next step is to create a place where we can install debian and the third step boots. You might notice I’ve no networking setup and that bites me later as the only way out is to use the < Go Back > feature and skip ahead to partitioning.
demonstrates escaping out of the d-i apt-setup
Notice, although I formatted a 500MB image and later I will create a partition half that size and format it ext3, it will not use up that much disk space. I will point out I did not do the base-install, merely partitioned and formatted. For the record, if you use the business card iso and do not get qemu to work with networking you cannot install debian. If you’d like to use qemu and install debian you must get a different iso. I would suggest the netinstall iso instead as it includes the base-system.
Okay so the first series of screenshots shows me partitioning an empty qemu qcow disk. And here they are:
Okay this one threw me for a loop and I doubt you’ll ever see this screenshot on anything other than qemu. I chose msdos since I have x86 hardware and it worked. But I have no clue what the implications of this means.
On to partitioning an empty disk:
The above screenshot tour doesn’t directly address Anita's problem with the partitioner. Lets try and replicate it. I’ll admit she probably has a half dozen partitions and my screenshots show one partition and free space and nothing more so it doesn’t appear quite as daunting as it might.
So at this point I killed the instance of qemu. Well no, nothing so drastic, I merely closed the window. Bonus points to qemu, it gracefully died and I was able to just run:
doug@ubuntu:~/qemu $ qemu -hda c.img -cdrom linux.iso -boot d -m 128 -localtime
and start the installer from the beginning. Only this time I’m able to replicate the pre-existing partition which is more probably the norm.
Let’s go!
So now we’ve run through hoops, at least if understand Anita’s post correctly, and seen what she’s talking about.
In her own words, ‘Chalk that up to it just being different and now that I know how it works, it shouldn’t throw me next time’. Lots of people have had trouble with the debian installer’s partitioner. It’s kinda funky compared to the interfaces seen in other installs. Yes I suppose you could argue I didn’t use the Ubuntu installer, but seriously it’s pretty close to identical.
Contributed by Doug Skranak – copied with his permission from http://www.geocities.com/skranak_doug/
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