Octave for windows using QEMU

[Michael Creel]

Under the category of amazing but not quite useful tricks...

I just placed a special version of the Knoppix CD in the tray of a computer 
running windows. The CD autoruns, and starts up Knoppix running in a QEMU 
window. Networking works automatically, using NAT - no configuration at all 
is needed. Next, since the Knoppix CD uses unionfs, software can be added on 
the fly using apt-get, no remastering needed. I opened up a konsole, did 
apt-get update; apt-get install octave, and quite a bit of time later had a 
working installation of Octave. This is the Debian Linux binary version of 
Octave, running on Windows, with no VMware or anything else, just a CD.

The catch is that this is all vvveerrryyy sssllooowww. Nevertheless, it's an 
interesting proof of concept. One could use QEMU to run just octave, and not 
the entire Knoppix CD, KDE environment included. Perhaps that would be 
faster. Also, the computer I tried this on has only 512MB of RAM.

If anyone would like to try this out, there's a torrent of the CD at 
http://www.linuxtracker.org/download.php?id=278&name=KNOPPIX_V3.8.2-2005-05-05-EN-qemu-0.6.1-2.iso.torrent

If the torrent is too slow, I can put up an image on a server if there is any 
interest. This is definitely too slow to be of real use, but maybe if there 
is more support for QEMU it might get faster.

Cheers, Michael



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