Re (2): [Oberon] qemu boot travail

[Jack Johnson]

On Tue, 7 Sep 2004 23:27:43 +0200 (MEST), edgar at edgarschwarz.de
<edgar at edgarschwarz.de> wrote:
> Jack Johnson <knapjack at gmail.com> wrote:
> > qemu -hda somefile -cdrom AosCD.iso -boot d
> Could you elaborate what that means ?

Sure!

There's an x86 emulator for UNIX and UNIX-like OSes called QEMU, which
can be found at:

http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/

and it seems to run Bluebottle (and I suspect Native Oberon) just
fine, though Bluebottle has no drivers for QEMU's emulated network
card.

The above command tells qemu to use 'somefile' as the emulated hard
drive connected to the first emulated controller, to use 'AosCD.iso'
as the emulated CD-ROM drive, and to subsequently boot from the CD-ROM
drive.

> Could it be possible to run an Oberon from a CD using a 86 emulator on a
> 86 Linux machine ?

Yes.  Though I'm using the ISO image of a CD instead of the real
thing, I have since installed other OSes using tangible media.

> Can Oberon access the harddisk or a AOS partition on this harddisk ?

I believe so, though have not yet tested it.

QEMU seems to allow arbitrary files for drives, so though I'm using
'-cdrom AosCD.iso' I can just as easily use '-cdrom /dev/cdrom' and my
emulated machine now uses my actual hardware.  I suspect that I could
just as easily do '-hda /dev/hdb' and boot off a separate hard drive,
or '-hda /dev/sdb' and boot off my USB flash media (that mounts as a
SCSI device under Linux).

One problem at pointing it at a specific partition is that the
emulator assumes that the file is a complete drive, so using '-hda
/dev/hda4' would/could net you a second bootloader at the beginning of
that partition, which is probably not what you want.

-Jack