self contained qemu + OS package?

[bubach]

hello, I'm interested to know if there is any tools to make a standalone, self contained w32 EXE with qemu, config and small image-file for easy testing. so all you would need to do is click it and run. not even install it. no separate files.

my OS is simple enough to be able to run out of DOSbox if needed, so maybe that's easier - I think I've seen something like that for DOSbox.

but right now I can't find anything about it, and well if you know of any easy way to make a file like this let me know. I could always recompile any of the emulators myself and include the needed config & image file - but would be nice if there's a ready made solution out there.

[bluemoon]

I doubt that is possible at all. I'm not talking about technical difficulty but qemu is released under GPL license, if you distribute qemu, by definition you need to distribute a bunch of files, either way you need a zip or installer.

If your goal is "easy testing", I suggest to write a launcher, which is responsible for download/install the components and probably provide a list of kernel milestone version for user to try.

[bubach]

Isn't a message inside the program sufficient? Or I can just keep the license and possibly tweaked sources downloadable right next to the executable. Also qemu and other projects like it is so well known that there isn't much of a secret where to get the source.

This wouldn't be for me, or even the somewhat knowledgeable user, but a complete newbie. Anyway, I'll have to research it some more. As I said, I'm pretty sure that I've seen DOS games distributed this way with DOSbox.

[jnc100]

I suppose you could write some wrapper program that contains both qemu and your kernel image as binary blobs within it, then when it is run it extracts them to the users temp directory and runs them from there with whatever options you specify? In VC++ you'd just add them as resources then use the get resource functions to extract and save them and then use CreateProcess to actually run them, and probably delete them again at the end. I haven't seen a ready made program like this you could just use though. Licence wise I guess all you need to do is say somewhere this program contains qemu copyright author/year and where they can get the sources.

Regards,
John.