Live-CD testing tools?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Roger Johansson
  • Start date Start date
R

Roger Johansson

When building live-CD and Boot-CD:s it is awkward to test every new build
because you have to burn it on a CD and reboot from that CD to see if it
works.

Is there a program which allows the .iso file to be mounted and rebooted
from directly?

I do not think daemon or other CD-emulators in general have this feature,
they usually only allow an .iso file to be mounted as one of the drives
inside the already running operating system.

It would be very convenient to be ablo to test-boot the iso without
having to burn a CD first, so I wonder if anybody knows how to do that?
 
When building live-CD and Boot-CD:s it is awkward to test every new
build
because you have to burn it on a CD and reboot from that CD to see if it
works.

Is there a program which allows the .iso file to be mounted and rebooted
from directly?
Click to expand...
Yup - use an x86 CPU emulator. I currently use a commercial solution.
But I've tried freeware solutions too that work reasonably well - bochs
( bochs.sourceforge.net) and qemu
(http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/) There are versions for both
Windows and Linux.
It would be very convenient to be ablo to test-boot the iso without
having to burn a CD first, so I wonder if anybody knows how to do
Click to expand...
that?
With bochs, you need to play with it's configuration files. With qemu,
I think you need to type in qemu -boot d -cdrom 'filename.iso' at the
command line.

HTH
 
Yup - use an x86 CPU emulator. I currently use a commercial solution.
But I've tried freeware solutions too that work reasonably well - bochs
( bochs.sourceforge.net) and qemu
(http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/) There are versions for both
Windows and Linux.
Click to expand...
With bochs, you need to play with it's configuration files. With qemu,
I think you need to type in qemu -boot d -cdrom 'filename.iso' at the
command line.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the advice, but it seems to be an un-necessarily complicated
way to do things. Why run a PC simulator program when we already have
hardware PC:s available?

It would be better to just have a little program which let's the .iso
file pretend that it is booted from a physical CD.

But maybe nobody has written such a program yet.
 
Why run a PC simulator program when we already have
hardware PC:s available?
It would be better to just have a little program which let's the .iso
file pretend that it is booted from a physical CD.
Click to expand...

That's exactly what these programs do. The part of your PC that boots
the CD is the BIOS. These emulate the BIOS as well. No, I haven't
bumped into a program that only does only BIOS emulation :-)
 
Hello,
Thanks for the advice, but it seems to be an un-necessarily
complicated way to do things. Why run a PC simulator program when
we already have hardware PC:s available?

It would be better to just have a little program which let's the
.iso file pretend that it is booted from a physical CD.

But maybe nobody has written such a program yet.
Click to expand...

and what programs take care of the conflicts caused because two
systems use the same hardware components at the sane time? Not that
easy, as you might think. There is a reason, these emulators are
not written that way and some more sophisticated must be paid.

Regards,
Thorsten
 
and what programs take care of the conflicts caused because two
systems use the same hardware components at the sane time? Not that
easy, as you might think. There is a reason, these emulators are
not written that way and some more sophisticated must be paid.
Click to expand...

Such a program could shut down windows, and use the RAM memory to let the
iso-CD start, just like a real CD was in the CD unit.

The program could maybe even claim as much memory it can from windows and
do its thing while windows is still present, but maybe frozen.
 
REM said:
XOSL?
Click to expand...

I don't know if XOSL allows booting from an iso file, but the category
boot managers sounds more natural for such a program, than a virtual
PC emulator..
 
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