How much room does QEMU-Puppy need?

[Ian]

This is slightly off topic but still concerns Puppy.

I decided to try QEMU-Puppy so downloaded the files, raced out and bought a 256M USB pen stick, went to put the files on it and ran out of room after installing allinoneqemu.exe and most of pup001.

I didn't see anywhere what minimum size was required and had I known I would have got a bigger stick.

Does anyone know what the minimum size is.

The pup001 file got to 193M or so before I ran out of space.

[Ian]

I went back and had another go and this time I left the pup100 file till last, that worked but it consumed all the space left on the USB pen drive.
Now I can't get it to boot.

Time to give up, the neighbour just ran over one of my dogs and killed him.

[Erik Veenstra]

> I decided to try QEMU-Puppy so downloaded the files, raced
> out and bought a 256M USB pen stick, went to put the files on
> it and ran out of room after installing allinoneqemu.exe and
> most of pup001.
>
> I didn't see anywhere what minimum size was required and had
> I known I would have got a bigger stick.

256M will do. That's what I use myself. I added some info about
file size on the site [1].

> Does anyone know what the minimum size is.

Without the user data: 74,079,209 bytes.

With the user data: 208,296,937 bytes.

That's 62,791,391 bytes for Puppy Linux 1.0.4 itself,
11,287,818 bytes for the QEMU-Puppy specific stuff and
134,217,728 bytes for the user data...

You should end up having the files as listed below.

> The pup001 file got to 193M or so before I ran out of space.

I know the problem. I think. I hope. I'll try: You extracted
pup100.gz (130K) to pup100 (128M), put it on the stick and
copied your old pup001 (???M) to your stick as well. That won't
fit. For some reason, I don't know why, the pupxxx file is
called pup100 on USB devices, instead of pup001. It might be
enough to rename your pup001 to pup100, but I never did it
myself. Just experiment.

You could experiment with the block sizes of your VFAT. But
that's usually just important when trying to put a lot of small
files on a file system, which isn't the case.

There must be some reason to call it pup100 on USB devices...

gegroet,
Erik V. - http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/

[1] http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/qemupuppy/index.html

----------------------------------------------------------------

$ ls -l
-rwxr-xr-x 1 erik erik 655532 2005-08-06 17:05 allinoneqemu.exe
-rwxr-xr-x 1 erik erik 6369789 2005-08-06 17:03 image.gz
-r-xr-xr-x 1 erik erik 8236 2005-08-06 17:07 ldlinux.sys
-rwxr-xr-x 1 erik erik 134217728 2005-08-06 17:21 pup100
-rwxr-xr-x 1 erik erik 132414 2005-08-06 17:04 pup100.gz # Could be skipped!
-rwxr-xr-x 1 erik erik 10485760 2005-08-06 17:03 puphda
-rwxr-xr-x 1 erik erik 146397 2005-08-06 17:05 puppy.exe
-rwxr-xr-x 1 erik erik 129 2005-08-06 17:05 puppy.sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 erik erik 95 2005-08-06 17:03 syslinux.cfg
-rwxr-xr-x 1 erik erik 55365632 2005-08-06 17:04 usr_cram.fs
-rwxr-xr-x 1 erik erik 1047639 2005-08-06 17:03 vmlinuz

$ df .
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 250312 203568 46744 82% /media/usbdisk

----------------------------------------------------------------

[Erik Veenstra]

> I went back and had another go and this time I left the
> pup100 file till last, that worked but it consumed all the
> space left on the USB pen drive.

Strange... What happens when you reformat (VFAT) it first?
What's the file system right now, in the first place?

> Now I can't get it to boot.

Did you do the "syslinux /dev/sda1" or "syslinux D:" thing?

> Time to give up, the neighbour just ran over one of my dogs
> and killed him.

I'm sorry...

gegroet,
Erik V. - http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/

[BarryK]

Hi guys,
I have to speed-read the forum today...
scanning through this thread, why are you copying a pupxxx file to usb stick?
That's only required for an ntfs partition.
On any other partition, Puppy will create the pupxxx file at bootup, giving it the name specified in the isolinux.cfg or syslinux.cfg file.
...or, have I missed the point of what you're discussing?

[Ian]

Firstly Erik I must apologise for a mistype. I meant pup100 not pup001, sorry for the confusion I'm so used to typing pup001.

The pen drive came preformatted as vfat but I'm not sure if it is fat16 or fat32.

I'll try the commands you have supplied below.

Barry, I'm just following Erik's instructions from his web page so I can't comment at this point.

[Erik Veenstra]

> I have to speed-read the forum today... scanning through this
> thread, why are you copying a pupxxx file to usb stick?
>
> That's only required for an ntfs partition.
>
> On any other partition, Puppy will create the pupxxx file at
> bootup, giving it the name specified in the isolinux.cfg or
> syslinux.cfg file.
>
> ...or, have I missed the point of what you're discussing?

There's just one reason for pre-allocating pup100: If you start
QEMU-Puppy in a QEMU-mode, you do need a pup100 file. QEMU
won't start if it's not already there.

gegroet,
Erik V. - http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/

[Ian]

Well Erik I downloaded all the files again and put them on the pen drive.

The pen drive is mounted as /mnt/sda1.

This time the pup100 file only took up 128M but when I ran syslinux /dev/sda1 it gave the message:

syslinux: possibly unsafe /tmp permissions

and running puppy.sh gives:

qemu: No such file or directory

Does this mean that I have to install qemu in Puppy.

[Erik Veenstra]

> Well Erik I downloaded all the files again and put them on
> the pen drive.
>
> The pen drive is mounted as /mnt/sda1.
>
> This time the pup100 file only took up 128M but when I ran
> syslinux /dev/sda1 it gave the message:
>
> syslinux: possibly unsafe /tmp permissions

You can probably ignore this message. It looks like a warning
to me. But I'm not a SysLinux expert...

> and running puppy.sh gives:
>
> qemu: No such file or directory
>
> Does this mean that I have to install qemu in Puppy.`

You have to install Qemu on your host, not in Puppy. (Unless
Puppy is your host...) I've build Qemu myself, including
kqemu.so, which is an accelerator. You won't get native speed,
but it's still very fast. Which distribution do you use?

I'll spend some time on trying to build a AllInOneQEMU for
Linux...

gegroet,
Erik V. - http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/

[Flash]

Wait a minute. You mean qemu has to be already installed on each machine you're going to run qemu-Puppy on? It can't somehow take over the host computer by loading from the USB pen drive? What's the use of that?

I went to the qemu website to see what this was all about, and didn't see anything in plain english which explained what qemu is for.

[Erik Veenstra]

> Wait a minute. You mean qemu has to be already installed on
> each machine you're going to run qemu-Puppy on? It can't
> somehow take over the host computer by loading from the USB
> pen drive? What's the use of that?



> I went to the qemu website to see what this was all about,
> and didn't see anything in plain english which explained what
> qemu is for.

Copied from the site (including the typo): "QEMU emulates a
full system (for example a PC), including a processor and
various peripherials. It can be used to launch different
Operating Systems without rebooting the PC or to debug system
code."

In other words: QEMU is a virtual machine. A virtual machine is
a program that acts like computer hardware. In such a virtual
machine, you can install a OS (Linux, Windows, BSD, whatever).
This OS "sees" a processor, which is the real processor (I'm
lying...), "sees" a hard drive, which is a big file on the host
machine, "sees" a network card, which is emulated by QEMU, and
so on.

I've several of these QEMU-machines: QEMU-Win98, QEMU-Win2000,
QEMU-Puppy, QEMU-VectorLinux. They can all be started
simultaneously. Each machine is just one big file on the host
machine. Easy to backup, easy to carry around. And easy to
share among several developers: Install and tweak the OS just
once and then copy it to all developers: Same kernel, same
libraries, same software. An idea for the Vector Linux
installation Barry uses to build Puppy's kernel and binaries?

VMWare is another virtual machine. It's better than QEMU, but a
bit expensive. QEMU is open source.

gegroet,
Erik V. - http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/

[BlackAdder]

Erik's QEMU works really well for me, but needs a pretty fast processor and quite a bit of memory. That relates to QEMU generally and not Erik's excellent and well-documented implementation for Puppy.
Must admit that I cheated a bit and put QEMU onto an external USB hard drive, so avoided any problems with the size of a USB stick.
Very nice to see Puppy running happily alongside Windows XP.

[Ian]

I'm sorry to have wasted everyone's time but like Flash I thought that Erik's implementation of QEMU on a USB flash drive was a file that contained the emulator and would just attach to whatever filesystem you were using and allow you to run Puppy without needing anything else on the host machine.

Maybe this will happen in the future, thanks for your replies and advice Erik.

[BlackAdder]

Maybe people have been talking at cross-purposes. QEMU-Puppy is indeed another way to get Puppy on a stick. The difference is that it can run alongside the other operating system and does not need a re-boot. QEMU engineers an environment that allows Puppy to pseudo-boot, for want of a better term.
Attached is a screen shot of Puppy running alongside Windows XP, actually it is more like strolling in Puppy terms, but it does work and gives you an environment in which Puppy can play without upsetting the big dogs on the block.
Maybe if we are nice to Erik, he might look at incorporating the QEMU accelerator (? licence conditions, though).

Next stop XEN?

[Flash]

Perhaps this is an opportunity for me to ask someone who knows the answer: what practical use does an emulator have?

Depending on how accurately and completely the emulator emulates the target processor (not the host processor), I can see how it could be used to step through a program, halting at any time to examine the contents of registers, etc., in the emulated processor, something not possible when running the program on a real processor.

Other than that, I can't see any reason for an emulator such as QEMU or VM.

[Ian]

What I can remember of VMware, once it is set up it doesent need to do anything else it is just a virtual computer running inside a program running in an OS so it uses what is already running.

I used VMware a few years ago and it ran ok just slower than the real thing.

What I would use an emulator for is to run Puppy on any machine while another operating system is in operation without having to install anything and having to reboot.

This is my scenario:

Go to a machine running Winxxx, plug in USB drive containing emulator and Puppy, start Puppy, do some work, stop Puppy, unplug USB, go home, get drunk and not have to worry about host machine as nothing is changed and it has not rebooted.(yet)

That way you don't care about the host machine or its OS as you have not done anything except run a program on it.

[Erik Veenstra]

> > I'll spend some time on trying to build a AllInOneQEMU for
> > Linux...

I've build an AllInOneQEMU for Linux. You can even run
QEMU-Puppy in QEMU-mode on Puppy-Linux itself! (It might not be
useful, but it is funny...)

I'll probably release it tonight.

gegroet,
Erik V. - http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/

[Erik Veenstra]

> > > I'll spend some time on trying to build a AllInOneQEMU
> > > for Linux...
>
> I've build an AllInOneQEMU for Linux. You can even run
> QEMU-Puppy in QEMU-mode on Puppy-Linux itself! (It might not
> be useful, but it is funny...)
>
> I'll probably release it tonight.

Well, it's alive! I've build this AllInOneQEMU for Linux and
released it just a couple of minutes ago.

The download of QEMU-Puppy is now only one big file.
Installation is much easier.

For more information and download:

http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/qemupuppy/index.html

gegroet,
Erik V. - http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/