Linux box on Windows

It's frequent task for programmer: developing of application for alien OS. If you use Windows as host system and need Linux box, there are several free solutions: VmWare Player, VirtualBox, QEmu for your pleasure :)

But after done with virtual machine, you should to create some "bridge" to data exchange with guest OS (ssh/scp, samba/nfs, ftp, shared folder...). When you use VirtualBox, for example, you should install additional software to guest OS. But there is simpler solution: qemu with virtual FAT folders.

Download from QEmu on Windows ZIP file with qemu (yes, it's portable, and is only about 4Mb in ZIP!). Uncompress.

Suppose, we need only developer's box: no X, only GNU toolchain.

Let's try Archlinux, see: www.archlinux.org (download "CORE" ISO image).
Then create image - space for VM:

qemu-img create linux.img 1G

1G is enough room. This will be done quickly.
Then let's boot from ArchLinux CD image:

qemu -m 256 -hda c:\vm\linux.img -cdrom c:\vm\archlinux-2010.05-core-i686.iso -boot d -L c:\qemu\bios

We suppose user uncompress qemu to c:\qemu and puts images to c:\vm. After boot you should install ArchLinux - it's easy, but long :)
OK, after installation you can run Linux box with sharing some folder from host OS. Create first some folder, for example, c:\vm\shared. Then run qemu:

qemu -m 256 -hda c:\vm\linux.img -L c:\qemu\bios -hdb fat:rw:/vm/shared

QEmu creates virtual drive (hdb) from host folder "c:\vm\shared", and you can mount it in Linux box:

su
mkdir /shared
mount -f vfat /dev/sdb1 /shared

"Read-Write" option in qemu is dangerous, so more preferable is to run qemu without "write" mode. For example, in current (0.13.0) version of Windows qemu build there is error: if you add some text to file in /shared, this file will be deleted (on host, yeh:). Use it for read-only access, and never modify shared folder on host when it is mounted in the guest OS.

Have a fun!