Per the title, I want to install Slax (version 9.11.0) to a .img file for use with qemu, as a virtual machine. I've tried a bunch of things over four hours, and I've been unable to do this.
My understanding is with most distributions, you use qemu-img
to create a .img
file, use qemu-system
to boot a .iso
file with a .img
provided, and most operating systems will provide some sort of "Install to disk" option. After doing so, you can simply boot using qemu-system
and the .img
. Changes will be saved to the .img
.
But Slax is different, and offers no "Install to disk" method. Nothing is stored on the .img
. It's acts like a live, non-persistent disk.
Slax still has an installation method. It's easy to create an installer on a physical device (such as a USB), with instructions here: https://www.slax.org/starting.php But I cannot find how to apply this method to a .img
file!
Some possibly useful information about what I tried:
I tried to reproduce those instructions by using dd
and mkfs
to create a .img
file with an msdos
filesystem, but running the bootinst.sh
did not work. With a bit of inspection, I see the script failed around line 127
, because extlinux.x64
tried to run and reported cannot find device for path .
, cannot open device (null)
, returning exit code 1
. I don't know enough about images and filesystems to diagnose this, but I guess it's because my .img
is not a physical device (like a USB.)