[Mageia-dev] Official VM images for Mageia 2?

Romain d'Alverny rdalverny at gmail.com
Thu Jan 26 12:37:38 CET 2012


On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 11:16, Buchan Milne <bgmilne at staff.telkomsa.net> wrote:
> On Wednesday, 25 January 2012 17:30:23 Romain d'Alverny wrote:
> Generic VM images, or ones targetted at specific uses? If specific uses, it
> might be worthwhile considering live ISOs targetted at the use case with
> installation support.
>
> In my case, I would consider looking at a minimal XBMC-based (possibly with
> samba and a few other tools as well) live ISO/USB.

I would consider at least those 3:
 - a generic minimal system install ISO (quick to download and base
from which we can generate more elaborate images)
 - equivalent generic minimal system VM
 - derivatives:
   - a Vagrant image (same as above + a specific user/packages setup)
   - your XBMC-based one

I started playing with a boot.iso + auto_inst.cfg (this is really
great, we ought to document it better somewhere about it) + Vagrant a
few weeks ago, but didn't make it yet. Will clean this up and post it
somewhere.

>> Target VMs: Xen, VMWare, Virtualbox, Vagrant (with a minimal install +
>> specific config), other, you name it, as long as it can be managed
>> (best would be to have these build automatically from source ISOs +
>> ad-hoc auto_install.cfg + post install conf).
>
> Most of these tools support OVF, so do we have tools that can generate OVF
> easily?

No idea.

> What about publishing official images to Amazon EC2?

Yes!

> I don't know if there is that much value in providing specific VM images, when
> instead we may want to look at providing good tools for sharing VM configs and
> tools for easily generating images from those configs.

I'd say both. Sharing configs and tools is great, having a few small
images available is great too for those that prefer to focus on using
it at once (and for cloud hosts too).

If we were to automate the process, could we chain somehow this:
 - bcd with a minimal system image
 - isocheck
 - vmbuild? foreach each vm config provided (we can store all this in
svn), does:
   - push specific auto_inst script into the install ISO
   - run the ISO into the virtual environment
   - package the VM
   - checks
   - deliver to download


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