Re: [Qemu-devel] Booting my laptop with images from Qemu advent calendar

[Thomas Huth]

On 06.12.2016 23:42, Oscar A wrote:
> Hello dear all,
> 
> I just started to get interested in operative systems, booting, and
> virtual machines, and found this project, which is very nice. I have
> a question. For instance, take the Hanoi´s towers image of yesterday.
> 
> I want to boot my laptop with it. I guess that if I do it correctly, nothing
> wrong should happen. But I do not know if I have Open firmware or
> not. I have an HP pavilion dm4 1065dx laptop with Windows 7 home
> 64 bit and Fedora, and I am using H20 Insyde uefi/bios. Does this
> laptop have open firmware or is it compatible? Do you know that? Or
> can you give me some hints on this? How can I check this for instance?

 Hi Oscar,

Open Firmware is some kind of alternative to BIOS/UEFI, and it normally
can *not* be found on x86 hardware (the "One Laptop Per Child" computer
was an exception). Open Firmware is/was rather available on PowerPC and
SPARC computers.

But if you're still interested in booting small gimmicks directly on
your computer, have a look at day 7 in the advent calendar:

 http://www.qemu-advent-calendar.org/2016/#day-7

Theoretically, it should be possible to boot this game directly if you
manage to put it into a boot sector of a floppy disk (or maybe also USB
stick, but I haven't tried).

 Thomas