[clug] Help with cloning an old Debian system please

[Alex Osborne]

On 19/08/2008, at 3:06 PM, Stephen Hodgman wrote:

> As for qemu, I was not aware of it at all.
> What experience have you had with this?
> It sounds an interesting thing to play with.

Yes, it's a very handy tool.  I use it all the time for development  
for the ARM architecture.  You can use it as a VM (like virtualbox),  
or alternatively set it up so that executing a binary for a different  
architecture transparently invoke qemu.  In this mode, instead of  
creating a full blown VM with another kernel, it catches system calls  
and translates them into native ones, so for most intents and  
purposes it's as if the application is running natively.  This mode  
wouldn't really help in your case though of course, as you need the  
other kernel to provide the iBCS2 emulation. ;-)

I've not used qemu a great deal for x86 virtualisation, but when I  
have I've never had any problems with it.  I use it like this from  
time to time for testing booting from a disk image or a CD without  
having to muck around putting it on physical hardware and making sure  
the BIOS and bootloader are setup correctly and whatever.  If there's  
no bootloader or kernel on a disk you want to boot from, you can just  
specify a bzImage file with a command-line option and it'll run the  
kernel file directly without needing lilo or grub.

I was just suggesting the same thing as Andrew though, I didn't see  
your reply to him until afterwards, turning the disk into an image  
and running it in a VM as it sounded like you wanted a solution to  
run the app on a newer machine.  I just suggested qemu as it's the  
virtualiser/emulator I'm most familiar with and I knew you can easily  
boot a dd'ed disk image with it.  I'm sure there's ways of doing the  
same thing with virtualbox or vmware or xen as well.