Freesbie on USB stick + qemu

[Michael S]

Good day all,

Just recently I discovered a new (for me) way of using
Freesbie and I wanted to share it with you. A few
months ago the motherboard on my FreeBSD machine gave
up, and I had no way of running Unix anymore (aside
from my ancient Toshiba that runs OpenBSD). I’ve
always liked Freesbie, but using it as a LiveCD and
rebooting between it and XP is daunting. 

Googling for “linux usb” brought me to this site
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/ . I tried most of the
Linux distros they have on that site, however for some
reason or another I was not satisfied, either it
didn’t have gcc (damn small) or couldn’t connect to
the internet (ubuntu). Then I remembered Freesbie and
decided to give it a try, running it from a usb stick
using Qemu. I followed the instructions for Ubuntu
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/2008/01/11/run-ubuntu-710-from-windows/
And the only thing that I had to do was to replace the
Ubuntu ISO image with the one of Freesbie. It feels
pretty snappy with Kqemu acceleration driver
installed. I can even store stuff on the stick; after
running the mountdisks script, an ext2fs partition is
mounted and I was able to save files on it and they
were there the next time I started Freesbie. I am able
to connect to the network. The only issue that I have
is when running X (startx), the window is tiny (800 X
600 pixels I believe), but it’s not a big deal.

Hope someone finds it interesting,
Michael


Michael Sherman
http://msherman77.blogspot.com/