Well OS/2 does work in QEMU, though I guess you might say that I cheated a bit - I did this by doing the install in VMware Player and then using qemu-img to convert the file from a vmdk to a qcow.
Virtualization
Loopback mountin' a specific partition inside a disk image
Loopback mounts are cool as heck. You can take a file containing an image of a partition and mount on top of your regular filesystem. But what if you have a file containing an entire disk image rather than just an image of a single partition? It's common to deal with such files when dealing with User Mode Linux (UML) root filesystems.
Well, you can still do it. It turns out that losetup and hence mount which uses losetup to do loopback mounting, allow you to specify an offset option to specify the starting offset into the file from which to read. Now the only trick is to use fdisk to figure out where the partitions are:
RHEL4 qemu-0.8.2 package
The following RPMs were built by downloading the 0.8.0 source RPMs from rpmforge, making a few minor mods, and then rebuilding:
Binary packages:
Source package:
User Mode Linux: SKAS0 poorly documented
It's unfortunate that SKAS0 mode is poorly documented on the User Mode Linux (UML) web site. For example, this page about SKAS doesn't mention it. It is explained in Jeff Dike's UML book though.
I wish they would update the UML web site as it gives the impression that TT and SKAS3 are the only choices, which is no longer true, as SKAS0 was added to the kernel in version 2.6.13.
Installing OS/2 Warp on Linux with VMware Player
I'm in a nostalgic mood lately, what with all the Atari stuff and now this.
I never got the OS/2 Warp 4 install to work in QEMU, but I'm most of the way through it in VMware Player, albeit very, very, very slowly.
Here's a few pics (there's more over at my Flickr of course):
VMBuilder
So everyone knows that VMware Player is free, but it doesn't let you create virtual machines; only play existing ones.
Luckily, the .vmx file format is a simple plain-text format and there are tools out there that will help you create one.
One such tool is a web-based tool called VMBuilder.
I used it to create a virtual machine for running OS/2 Warp. It worked quite well. I donated $5 to the author, as I believe in rewarding people for good work, so that they are inspired to do more.
