Technomancy

I’ve been playing with qemu recently and I’ve discovered some tips that make working with it easier. start qemu with “-monitor stdio” in the console, and you can put qemu commands into the console. None of this “ctrl-alt-2″ then “sendkey ctrl-alt-f2″, “ctrl-alt-1″ stuff. Instead of making a big blank 5GB file for the hard disk this way: dd if=/dev/zero of=hda.img bs=1M count=5000 Do it this way: qemu-img create hda.qcow 5G -f qcow This creates a qcow format image. It’s the same, but it will only take as much space as is needed. The first version takes up 5GB. You can eject the cdrom with ‘eject cdrom’ and ‘put in a new cd’ with “change cdrom /path/to/new.iso”