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

[Buchan Milne]

On Wednesday, 25 January 2012 17:30:23 Romain d'Alverny wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> I'd like to discuss/plan how we can build and distribute ready to use
> VM images of Mageia 2 along with original ISOs, from our download
> pages.

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.

> 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?

BTW., I have access to a VMWare vSphere environment with capaticy to run a few 
extra VMs (for testing images). For images for VMWare, it may also be 
worthwhile including some of the VMWare tools (there are open-source versions, 
and I believe Ubuntu ships these):

http://sourceforge.net/projects/open-vm-tools/

(We have X11 driver and mouse input driver, but these should provide drag 'n' 
drop, window resize, memory ballooning, guest shutdown etc.).

What about publishing official images to Amazon EC2?

> Uses can be: evaluation, development/staging environments, you name it too.
> 
> hurdman has some experience and is a first volunteer to work on this;
> others? (input, recipes, hands).

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.

Some interesting tools which we don't seem to have yet:
http://libguestfs.org/
http://libguestfs.org/virt-v2v/

http://libguestfs.org/virt-copy-in.1.html
http://libguestfs.org/virt-tar-in.1.html
http://libguestfs.org/febootstrap.8.html

Regards,
Buchan