Test x64 installer on virtual machine
Hello, I'm considering Nura for a couple of VERY old PCs (AMD Athlon XP old) to serve as public clients in a local library. Before doing that, I wanted to test the installer and the system in general on a virtual machine managed with virt-manager. I downloaded the installer image (20260925-1250-postmarketOS-edge-os-installer-10-generic-x86_64-lts.img), which the documentation says can be flashed on a usb stick with balena etcher and the like to install the OS, and I "inserted" it in the CD drive of the VM. However, when I switch on the VM it says that no bootable media is present. I'm not aware of etcher adding booting files to a flash, so I was expecting the image to be bootable. How can I do this? I know that qemu images exist, but I want to test the installer myself.
Thank you in advance to everyone who'll reply.
6 replies
You probably have to enable booting the CD rom in the boot section, this ones gotten me a couple times before.
Your assumptions are right about balena, it should just copy the exact .img blob to the flash drive without modifications.
But also run a lscpu on that old machine and check vulnerabilities, and maybe turn off hyperthreading if you don't want the library users to get hacked.
You're right that I didn't select it there, but when the no bootable media found showed up I opened up the boot manager and selected the QEMU DVD-ROM, but with no luck. Regardless, now I enabled it, but it still won't boot.
Weird, to narrow things down I'd try another installer image and see if it'll boot.
I tried the newest one from the second of October, but it also doesn't boot. I'll try to open a bug at this point I guess.
Could the problem be that you are trying to run 64-bit on 32-bit machines?
Those CPUs are x64, but more importantly at the moment I'm trying to install it on a virtual machine on my 1 year old laptop, which is definitely x64 :D