Knoppix3.8 with QEMU

[Species8372]

Hello,

i've got the Knoppix3.8 with QEMU (from c't) and can run it successfully on my Notebook (MSI S260).

Now i want to do the following and perhaps someone can help me?

I've got the CD-Image lying on my Windows-Partition and made it available as virtual-CD-ROM to start QEMU without having a real CD-ROM.

The only problem is, that Knoppix always will detect hardware upon starting which needs quite some time.

I already created a virtulal disc image, lying on my NTFS-partition which is mounted unter QEMU as /dev/hdb

Is it now possible to store the recognized hardware and settings to this partition to speed up Boottime and have some persistent working directory?
Or would i have to use the Knoppix-HD-Install inside QEMU?

I would prefer not to install Knoppix completely because its now quite compact and small and the only thing i want is to remember configurations and have some persistent space inside QEMU.

The strange thing is, that if i use qtparted the virtual disc image /dev/hdb (which is a image file under windows) shows up as /UNIONFS/dev/hdb and perhaps is not really persistent but writes to ramdisc? I dont know....
Using fdisk and mkfs however seems to work as i can access the new drive until next reboot.

Thankx for every comment

Species8372

[Species8372]

Perhaps i should ask the other way:

How can i make Knoppix save his detected hardware/device configuration so that it wont have to detect it new every time it starts up?

I know there is some menu saying "Save Knoppix configuration" but in my opinion it uses this configuration far to late... or is that a technical reason i dont understand?

And the problem i have with this feature is also, that it wont recognize my qemu-partition after reboot... do i have to enter the device into some configuration file like fstab or something??

[Species8372]

I managed now to have Knoppix3.8 installed in a virtual QEMU-Environment on my Notebook.

It really seems that disabling hardware-configuration (and using the last saved recognized hardware) is not possible with current Knoppix without installing, because the user-config is used too late??

I've created an knoppix.img-file with the image-creation tool provided on the knoppix iso. I made it 3.5GB.

I reconfigured QEMU to use the knoppix.iso (lying on my windows drive e) as boot cd-rom and using the knoppix.img as hda.
After the hardware-recognition i created a primary partition with cfdisk with 3.2GB for linux and a 0.3GB as swap, which should be enabled before installing.
Started knopixx-hdinstall and used the classic debian install. After quite some time (hours?) it was installed and i removed the knoppix.iso from qemu-start-script.

Now my virtual debian Linux boots within a few minutes (within my Windoze) remembering the hardware configuration and runs quite well and fast for an emulated linux :-)

For me who is using Linux not frequently it's now an optimal solution on my notebook having only qemu and the knoppix.img file on my partition and i dont have to worry about one OS interfering negatively with the other.