Linux Administration Cookbook

How to do it...

We're going to download an Alpine ISO and attempt an installation inside a virtual machine (inside our virtual machine):

$ wget http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.8/releases/x86_64/alpine-virt-3.8.1-x86_64.iso

I chose Alpine for this because it's tiny, fitting into 32 MB. 

Next, we need to create a virtual disk on which to install our OS:

$ qemu-img create example-disk 4GFormatting 'example-disk', fmt=raw size=4294967296

Now, we can use QEMU to boot our ISO atop our virtual drive:

$ qemu-system-x86_64 -drive file=example-disk,format=raw -cdrom alpine-virt-3.8.1-x86_64.iso -boot d -nographic

With any luck, you should see something like the following:

At the command-line prompt, you should be able to log in as the root ...