How to run Pidora in QEMU

Put the Pidora image and kernel-qemu in a directory (mine’s qemu, which I’m working from for the rest of this).

$ file pidora-18-r1c.img

pidora-18-r1c.img: x86 boot sector; partition 1: ID=0xc, active, starthead 32, startsector 2048, 102400 sectors; partition 2: ID=0x83, starthead 32, startsector 104448, 3389858 sectors, code offset 0xb8

Take the startsector number from partition 2 (bold above) and multiply by 512 to use as the offset number in the next step:

$ sudo mount qemu/pidora-18-r1c.img -o offset=53477376 /mnt/pidora

There’s one line in /mnt/pidora/etc/ld.so.preload. Comment it out and unmount:

$ sudo umount /mnt/pidora

$ qemu-system-arm -kernel kernel-qemu -cpu arm1176 -m 256 -M versatilepb -serial stdio -append "root=/dev/sda2 panic=1" -hda pidora-18-r1c.img

This will take you to the first boot screen, and you can go through that process, which will then reboot at the end, but you’ll have to start QEMU again:

Hit up and enter for one more round of:

$ qemu-system-arm -kernel kernel-qemu -cpu arm1176 -m 256 -M versatilepb -serial stdio -append "root=/dev/sda2 panic=1" -hda pidora-18-r1c.img

And you’re at the login screen. Not that quickly, of course. In fact, if you like to browse the Internet like it’s 1995, this is a good way to go:

All this based on instructions here, which leads to here.