Emulating a Linux Arm system on Windows

Please Note: I'm still hacking around here, to make this actually work!

Instructions

• Download qemu for windows: [1]
  • Extract the archive, and copy the following files into a new folder (You don't need the rest)
    • SDL.dll
    • qemu-system-arm.exe
    • qemu-img.exe

• Download the debian arm image, linux kernal, and ramdisk image from here: [2]
  • Copy these files into the same folder

• Extract debian_etch_arm_small.qcow.gz (WinRAR can handle .gz files) making sure the resultant debian_etch_arm_small.qcow file is in the same folder as the exe's. It's worth keeping this gz version in case you screw up your filesystem and want to start over!

• Create runme.bat in the same folder, and paste in the following:

REM SDL_VIDEODRIVER=directx is faster than windib. But keyboard cannot work well.
SET SDL_VIDEODRIVER=windib

REM SDL_AUDIODRIVER=waveout or dsound can be used. Only if QEMU_AUDIO_DRV=sdl.
SET SDL_AUDIODRIVER=dsound

REM QEMU_AUDIO_DRV=dsound or fmod or sdl or none can be used. See qemu -audio-help.
SET QEMU_AUDIO_DRV=dsound

REM QEMU_AUDIO_LOG_TO_MONITOR=1 displays log messages in QEMU monitor.
SET QEMU_AUDIO_LOG_TO_MONITOR=1
 
@qemu-system-arm.exe -M versatilepb -kernel vmlinuz-2.6.18-4-versatile -initrd initrd.img-2.6.18-4-versatile -hda debian_etch_arm_small.qcow -append "root=/dev/sda1"

qemu booting linux

• Double click on your batch file - you should see a QEMU window, and Linux begin to boot

Checking root file system

• Important this will probably hang during startup, due to a bug in the scsi emulation of qemu. Watch until you see the message "Checking root file system..." and a progress bar ticking across, and quickly press ctrl+c to skip the disk check.

• Once you get to a login prompt, you can log in as the administrator account (username root, password root) or as a regular user acount (user/user)

Known Issues

• This seems to boot the filesystem readonly, so you can't install any new packages (or do much that's actually useful!)