Hi,

It's hard to explain what I'm trying to do.

Firstly, I'd like to work in the linux shell environment. No desktop needed.

I'm trying to do this:

Put Linux on a USB drive that gives me the ability to read AND *write* to the file system on the USB drive. *NOT* load from an ISO where I have no access to the source file system.

I notice that most file systems within the iso's are compressed in a single file, and then uncompressed later into memory.

I need to have the ability to:

-insert a USB drive into my Windows PC
-run the Linux OS with Qemu
-make changes to the start-up/coinfig files *outside* the Qemu environment (ie Just using Windows Explorer to brows the USB drive and edit .conf files (i'm at work and can't use another computer)
-Reboot the in Qemu and see the changes I made

I'm basically trying to setup a testing environment for shell bootup.

The chellenges I'm facing is that everything seems to be in an .iso and LiveCD format when it comes to a smaller distrobutions. I'm realising I have no direct access to files in etc, bin, sbin, etc. I only have what is in memory which doesn't do me any good if I can not easily save the changes.

So is there a way I can just install Linux on the USB drive and see the etc, root, bin, through windows explorer when I insert the USB drive on my pc?

I'm at work and only have access to an xp machine.

Thanks!

1. There should be a way.

Obviously you'll need to use an "installable" Linux distro.

I said # 1 above because I have it the other way around. That is, I run Slackware 12.0 -- in Slack I fire up Qemu wherein I have a Windows 2000 that runs in this Qemu on Slack as the host OS.

Qemu does NAT and has its own built in Samba server. (I use Qemu's built in user mode networking stack) <-> (as opposed to VDE which you can add on to get even more power than what I have.)

Via said Samba server, in Win OS I can save to a Samba shared folder on my Slack OS. Then, Win does not need be running and I can edit with Slackware anything that came from Win.

(You'd have to place a copy of the file you wanted to edit then edit this copy then when running other OS, copy back the edited copy -- it's not direct like you asked -- but I'll still share this post.

--
Alan.

Perhaps you could install Cygwin on your Windows PC. Then you can use the Cygwin environment to access your USB drive and files.

This Ext2 IFS driver for Windows might help as it allows you to manage ext3 files from explorer. Check it out.

I personally have never used it because I'd rather Linux access Windows files and not the other way around, but I heard this is good software. Just keep in mind that Windows can't modify access rights properly, so actually it may be no help for you.

What would probably be more useful is to use something like VMware and set up a virtual machine on your USB stick. The trick to getting this to work the way you want it to, however, is to have the Virtual Machine use the actual hardrive and not a virtual one. Then you can run the Linux OS through VMware, but you can also modify the ext2/3 files on the USB stick using the driver linked above (which might be better done through something like Cygwin, however).

Just keep in mind that you will need to dedicate the entire USB stick to do this.

All you need is to enable a ssh server on the guest os, start qemu with tcp redirection, fire putty on windows, and work on the linux files on windows.

Alternatively you can use qemu built-in VNC server.