F.2. Test Skolelinux/Debian-edu on your computer with an emulator, qemu

Get latest version from http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/, at the time of writing that is 0.8.0

Unpack, and create a disk that is big enough,

qemu-img create /mnt/qemu.disk 6000

This will create a 6GB disk; the funny thing is that this size is not "real" before you start filling it up inside qemu. That means you can actually create a bigger qemu-disk than your physical disk. Before you create the qemu-disk, you can check your available space with df -h and do the same after you have created a 6GB qemu-disk, you will see the same space is available. The space is not used before you start installing something into qemu- very nice!

Either download a iso-image to you harddrive, or use a real cdrom.

qemu -m 128 -boot d -cdrom /tmp/debian-edu_sarge-i386-pr05.iso -hda /mnt/qemu.disk -monitor stdio

which will start a Skolelinux/Debian-edu install with 128MB ram onto qemu-disk /mnt/qemu.disk, if you are going to try a Thinclient install, you will need two network cards in your qemu, add the option -nics 2, like this

qemu -m 128 -boot d -cdrom /tmp/debian-edu_sarge-i386-pr05.iso -hda /mnt/qemu.disk -monitor stdio -nics 2

Once you are done with firststage in qemu, you need to start secondstage with

qemu -m 128 -cdrom /tmp/debian-edu_sarge-i386-pr05.iso -hda /tmp/qemu.disk

otherwise, it will not boot from the hard drive, but from the CD-ROM again.

If you wish to use a real cdrom, then the command looks like thins

qemu -m 128 -boot d -cdrom /dev/hdc -hda /mnt/qemu.disk -monitor stdio -nics 2