Linux on any device

Igelle works wonderfully under the KVM virtualizer and can easily be trialled under KVM. Especially since Igelle is not yet quite complete, and you might hesitate to install as a complete replacement for your current OS (and rightfully so), the KVM virtual machine makes it easy to try it out without “causing any damage”. For this, you need to first be running any other Linux distribution (for Windows users, you might want to look at other Windows-based virtualization solutions). Here’s how:

1. Download Igelle i386 ISO

Download the latest ISO installer for i386 from the Igelle project site.

2. Install KVM

The exact steps for how to install KVM depends largely on the distribution you are currently using. For Ubuntu, you can do simply;

sudo apt-get install kvm

And you’re done. For other distributions, please refer to your respective package management systems. If all else fails, you can go get KVM straight from the project site. (as long as you have a recent kernel that has KVM support built-in)

3. Prepare a hard disk image

KVM hard disk images are regular files of necessary size, and are easy to create with the “dd” utility. To create a 512Mb hard disk image (which is more than enough to trial Igelle), you can simply use the following command:

dd if=/dev/zero of=~/igelle-trial.img bs=1024 count=524288

This makes you a file filled with zeroes (from /dev/zero), with 524288 blocks of 1024 bytes (which is just a fancy way of saying “512 megabytes”). After this, the file “igelle-trial.img” in your home directory works as your hard drive image for KVM.

4. Make sure your KVM kernel driver is loaded

To support hardware virtualization, KVM needs the kernel driver to be loaded. You need to choose the one proper for your hardware (either Intel or AMD, as of now). Depending on your hardware, you’ll need to do either

sudo modprobe kvm-intel

or

sudo modprobe kvm-amd

If this fails for any reason, you can still proceed, but without hardware support KVM will not run at a much slower speed.

5. Install Igelle from the ISO image

Since you’ll be running under a virtual machine, there’s no need to write the ISO image to a real CD. Just boot KVM from the image and point KVM to use your image as the hard drive:

kvm -hda ~/igelle-trial.img \
    -cdrom ./igelle-iso_*_i486.iso \
    -boot d

(assuming you downloaded the ISO to the current directory)

Go through the installation as prompted. Hopefully the installation steps are self-explanatory. Choose “Normal installation (default)” when prompted.

6. Start Igelle

Once the installation is done, close your KVM and start again (this time without the ISO image):

kvm -hda ~/igelle-trial.img

..and hopefully enjoy the experience

PS., it seems that changing screen modes under KVM is quite slow, and causes an apparent “freeze” with a black screen (at least for me). This seems to be an issue of KVM/qemu, not Igelle. Waiting for it to clear should only take a few seconds.

Tags: Igelle, Tips and Tricks