VMware Live CD Player
October 2nd, 2006Live CDs have become quite popular, but I’ve always argued that it’s easier and more convenient to run virtual machines inside a host OS because it gives you the Internet and file access that you typically need when experimenting with something new. Never mind the hassle to actually burn live CDs. However, there are many more live CDs available than there are VMware virtual appliances. Here’s a neat little script that will enable you to launch a live CD, as an ISO image, inside VMware Player. Here’s what you need to do:
- Of course you first need to have the VMware Player installed. (See previous post for more info)
- Download the OS Integrated Live CD Player, available as a BitTorrent download from the VMware directory. If you don’t have a BitTorrent client try µTorrent, a portable BitTorrent client.
- Read the README.txt. For Windows it goes something like this:
There is no configuration script for Windows 2000/XP, so it will need to be configured manually.
From Windows Explorer, Click “Tools” -> “Folder Options”. Select the “File Types” tab and scroll down the list looking for the type with extension ISO (If it is not there, you will need to make one by clicking “New”). Highlight the ISO type and Click “Advanced”. Click “New” and under “Action:” give it a name like “Boot with VMware”. Under “Application used to perform action:”, give the filename with path to the ISOPLAYER.BAT script, followed by and switches you want and finally “%1″. It is important that the %1 be enclosed in quotation marks. Also make sure to enclose in quotes any filename that inclused spaces.
For example, you might type something like this:
“C:\isoplayer\isoplayer.bat” /d /vmware:”C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Player\vmplayer.exe” “%1″After this, click “Ok”.
So it really is easy to set up even though it doesn’t use an installation wizard. Once setup you can download and launch live CDs within a virtual machine without burning CDs and without installing anything!
October 20th, 2006 at 2:08 pm
Is there any way to get the file “un-Torrent”-ed? I have been having problems with my bittorrent client, and no one seeded it. Any help???
October 20th, 2006 at 5:08 pm
I’d suggest to try µTorrent. It’s a free BitTorrent client and they also have a Web UI.
October 21st, 2006 at 9:03 am
I kind of meant “can you download the file directly?”, but I did download uTorrent (I had previously been using the BitTorrent client), and I found a little trick: I opened both clients at the same time, and tried to download the same file at the same time with both clients, and the client thought it had been seeded! I didn’t have to wait for the file to be seeded to download it!
[My main problem was waiting hours for it to be seeded, and this is only a 9kb file.] Thanks for the link!
-roberto