Running a Porteus Virtual Machine from USB in a limited user

[Michele13]

Hi everyone. I was wondering if it was possible to install a virtual machine that would lunch porteus inside a Windows Limited account. I sometimes use university's computers and I like to have a Porteus Environment on my pocket that I could run without messing around with the bios of the computers and/or the Grub bootloader that usually boots up debian. The bootloader command line is not protected so I can just type in some commands to boot up plop bootloader and then chainload syslinux from it, but it feels hackish and I think it's not allowed. the Debian distro is protected by password and the Windows 7 account credentials that I use to log in does not allow me to carry all my settings and programs between all the computers... So since i like to be the admin of my system and since I like to use linux is there a way to boot Porteus without using Virtualbox? Perhaps Qemu? However it's slow and it hangs a lot during the boot process..

[francois]

You just have to set the bios of the computer you use to boot the usb key first with the f11, f12 or whatever key of the box.
Porteus is perfectly well suited to hop from one computer to the other. But my suggestion is not about using a virtual machine.

[Michele13]

You just have to set the bios of the computer you use to boot the usb key first with the f11, f12 or whatever key of the box.
Porteus is perfectly well suited to hop from one computer to the other. But my suggestion is not about using a virtual machine.

you know what happens if a professor comes in when I mess with the bios settings right? I want to avoid with messing around with the actual computer setup xD

[cttan]

Hi Michele13,

What francois meant was not to mess with the bios settings.

In some computers or laptop, you can boot from CD/DVD or even USB by pressing the F10/F11/F12 key.

[Bogomips]

F9 on mine.

[francois]

1) Thru bios: just take note of the computer model and search on the net.

2) Virtualbox solution. Otherwise, you will need to set virtual box within the window host or ubuntu host. But you might not be allowed the necessary priviledges to do so. Its worth a try. You should practice on you linux box at home first with virtual box. You will have to set right access to be able to transfer files from you virtual porteus installation to the windows or ubuntu host.

3) If ubuntu is on the your boxes at school, you might try to add an additional menu entry to boot from porteus.iso file to grub.cfg thru the update grub command. But once more you might not have the necessary priviledges to do so as the boot up of these computer might be controlled by a network server. Is it the case?
In addition, this last solution is even more intrusive than the first one.
Boot from iso with grub2
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2/ISOBoot

[Michele13]

or plug in the USB boot the pc, start grub, go to command line and load kernel and initrd from there