We know that we can run many operating systems as a “guest” inside a “host” operating system using a virtualization software. There are many such virtualization software available such as VMWare Workstaton, Qemu and Oracle VirtualBox. Qemu is a virtualization software that does not give much of a graphical user interface. You have to run a guest operating system using Qemu using the command line interface.
For example, if you want to run a Linux Live CD using Qemu on Windows, you can give the following command:
qemu-system-x86_64.exe -boot d -cdrom fossapup64-9.5.iso -m 2048
This command loads the Puppy Linux CD (fossapup64-9.5.iso) and gives it 2 GB of RAM to use. Obviously, to use this command, you must have installed Qemu on your Windows PC.
But if you are not a big fan of the command line applications, then you can try Mobatek MobaLiveCD instead. It is a portable application for Windows which allows quick loading of bootable Linux CD ISO images using Qemu. It comes with very old KQEMU driver which loads ISO images faster.
MobaLiveCD is a portable application and does not require any installation. After launching MobaLiveCD, we can click on the Run the Live CD button. Next, we have to select the ISO image of the Linux distribution and it will run it using Qemu for you. MobaLiveCD can also run the Linux under Qemu from a bootable USB pendrive.
If you often download Linux ISO images to your computer for the purpose of checking them out, you can add MobaLiveCD to the File Explorer’s context-menu. After this, you can simply right-click on an ISO image file and choose to run it using MobaLiveCD.
Even though MobaLiveCD is very handy for running Linux ISO images, it might not work on newer versions of Windows. This is because it comes with very old KQEMU files. We can use latest version of QEMU instead but then you have to use the command line interface.
You can download Mobatek MobaLiveCD from https://www.mobatek.net/labs_mobalivecd.html.