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.