Create a Linux virtual machine that can run on a Windows, Linux, or Mac OSX host. The VM can be moved around on a USB drive or even synced via DropBox between machines.

OS: Tiny Core Linux

Tiny Core Linux is small and simple. Its size makes it the perfect guest OS for this project.

Create a directory called tc to store all the files for this project.

Let’s grab the latest Tiny Core Linux iso.

Once it is downloaded extract the vmlinuz and core.gz files from the iso to our tc folder. You can do this by mounting the iso or opening it in some sort of archive manager like 7-zip and copying the files out.

You should now have these files in the tc directory. 

vmlinuz
core.gz

Those files are our kernel and initramfs, respectively.

VM Platform: QEMU

There are no official QEMU builds for Windows, but there are a number of unofficial builds.

I found that the builds by Eric Lassauge seemed the best for what I want to accomplish with this project. Download the latest Qemu Windows build zip file (2.2.0 at the time this was written) from his website.

The most important reason I am going to suggest using the “lassauge builds” for this project is that the files are entirely portable. No installation of any sort is required on Windows. Download and copy the QEMU files to our tc directory and you will have a simple, portable, working VM platform for Windows.

Your tc directory should look like this now.

Qemu-2.2.0-windows
vmlinuz
core.gz

There are a number of qemu-system-*.exe files in Qemu-2.2.0-windows that you do not need. You can safely delete all of them except for qemu-system-i386.exe. That is the only binary we need to run our VM. Deleting the other system binaries will save us a lot of space.

On Linux, QEMU should be installable through your preferred package manager. On OSX, you should be able to use something like brew to install QEMU as easily as you could on Linux.

Create Virtual Hard Drive

Let’s create a hard disk for our VM. You may use the qemu-img command that QEMU provides. This binary will either be in the Qemu-2.2.0-windows directory we extracted if you’re on Windows, or it should be installed system-wide if you’re using QEMU on a Mac or Linux host. 

qemu-img create -f vpc tc.vhd 4G

That command should generate a 4GB sparse virtual hard disk file. The disk should only be a few KB large initially, but has the ability to grow up to 4GB. You can use whatever size or file format you prefer for the disk image, but I prefer vhd since Windows can natively handle that format as an added bonus.

Your tc directory should look like this now.

Qemu-2.2.0-windows
vmlinuz
core.gz
tc.vhd

Run it!

Now we can start our VM. You may prefer to script this so you don’t have to memorize the command.

Windows

Qemu-windows-2.2.0\qemu-system-i386 -L Qemu-windows-2.2.0\Bios -m 1024 -kernel vmlinuz -initrd core.gz -hda tc.vhd -append "home=sda1 opt=sda1 tce=sda1"

OSX or Linux

qemu-system-i386 \
    -m 1024 \
    -kernel vmlinuz \
    -initrd core.gz \
    -hda tc.vhd \
    -append "home=sda1 opt=sda1 tce=sda1"

On Windows only, we need to specify the absolute path to the QEMU VM executable, and the -L flag is needed to specify the path to our QEMU Bios files (incuded with QEMU).

Regardless of the OS, we specify which file is our kernel, which is our initramfs, what to use as the primary hard drive, and finally, we pass some additional boot options to Tiny Core specifying where our home, opt, and tce directories live.

Format Virtual Hard Drive

Warning: You must run these commands inside the QEMU VM. If you run these commands on your host machine you may damage your system!

After you boot to the VM using the commands above, format the disk.

You can run these steps manually, but I am showing this single command to format the entire virtual hard drive. 

printf "o\nn\np\n1\n\n\nw\n" | sudo fdisk /dev/sda

Next, create an ext4 filesystem on our newly created partition. 

sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1

Then reboot so that Tiny Core can use that disk.

sudo reboot

Done

At this point, you should be done, and just need to install packages to customize your VM as you see fit.

Qemu tips

Here are some neat things you can do with QEMU.

# Port forwarding, some ports require elevated permissions on your host.
-redir tcp:80::80 -redir tcp:8000::8000

# Create a "shrunken" copy of your VHD file.
# Remove any reserved space from the sparse disk.
qemu-img convert -O vpc tc.vhd tc.vhd.copy

Qemu has an awesome way to let you access just about any virtual hard disk using the “Network Block Device” protocol. This will work on a *nix system only. 

sudo modprobe nbd max_part=16
sudo qemu-nbd -c /dev/nbd0 /path/to/tc/tc.vhd
sudo mount /dev/nbd0p1 /mnt/

10.0.2.2 is an IP address that can be used to access your host VM from within the QEMU guest.

Tiny Core tips

# Change the label of a partition to something like "hd01"
sudo tune2fs /dev/sda1 -L hd01

# Mount persistent partitions by label
tce=LABEL=hd01

# Specify an ISO image to mount when running the QEMU VM
-cdrom /path/to/file.iso

Citations