When you want to quickly boot from a drive or image in a virtual machine you do not need to setup up a VirtualBox machine. Often QEMU does the job well enough.
Install it:
sudo apt-get install qemu
To boot an ISO:
qemu-system-x86_64 -cdrom filename.iso
If you prepared a USB pen drive and want to test it, run it like this (/dev/sdx being your device name; you may need to sudo to access it):
qemu-system-x86_64 -hda /dev/sdx
Be aware that not everything runs smoothly in QEMU -- you might need to set up a VirtualBox for complex scenarios.
On older Ubuntus, you could still say qemu where it's now qemu-system-x86_64 or qemu-system-i386.
Posted by Arne Hartherz to makandra dev (2011-05-09 08:02)