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

[Buchan Milne]

On Thursday, 26 January 2012 13:37:38 Romain d'Alverny wrote:
> 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

Why? Do you want to provide an installable (ie, drakx) ISO, that requires the 
user to click through the installation? If not, skip this.

>  - isocheck
>  - vmbuild? foreach each vm config provided (we can store all this in
> svn), does:
>    - push specific auto_inst script into the install ISO

Rather:
1)Install
-use virt-install to boot a VM with auto_install pointing to official repo
or
-modify draklive to install into raw volumes (which also uses auto_install)
2)Convert raw volumes to OVF

>    - run the ISO into the virtual environment
>    - package the VM
>    - checks
>    - deliver to download

Regards,
Buchan