Re: Providing official virtualisation images of Debian
On Tue, Jul 26, 2011 at 12:27:09AM +0200, Moritz Mühlenhoff wrote:
> What virtualisation solutions should be supported?
> - Virtual Box seems like a natural candidate since it's free and
> included since Squeeze.
> - Vmware has a significant installed base and is relevant, although
> proprietary
> - Microsoft Virtual PC is likely also needed
> - Qemu
> - Citrix XenServer?
You don't mention KVM explicitly (it's almost identical to Qemu,
but fast), or Xen. Anyway, qemu-img can convert a raw disk image
into many other formats. So you generate one raw image, and then
convert it to any other formats using qemu-img.
> How should the images be generated?
vmdebootstrap --image=debian-squeeze.img --size=4G \
--mirror=http://cdn.debian.net/debian --distribution=squeeze \
--enable-dhcp --root-password=password1 --user=tomjon/password \
--hostname=squeezebox --package=gnome
That should get you started. Vary the packages as you wish, and
see also the --customize option for futher tweaking.
(vmdebootstrap is not in Debian at this time, but see
http://liw.fi/vmdebootstrap/ for the home page, and help with
packaging if you start using it, please.)
It would probably be nice to have a debian-installer based way to
generate the images, so they're as close to a real, installed system
as possible, but vmdebootstrap (or one of the other similar tools)
will do in a pinch.
> IMO the images would need to be created by a DD
IMHO, if the project will provide them, then they should be run
via cronjobs (or triggered by uploads) on a suitable project machine.
> Do people think this is relevant and are willing to work on providing
> one of the images? If so, we could arrange a BoF at DebConf.
I'm not at Debconf, but you may want to talk to Tom Marble or
Zack-the-DPL, who are hosting a BoF on automated testing, which
may include some image generation as a side-effect.
I'll note that for distribution, offering zsync is probably a
good idea: an updated image is going to be almost identical to
the previous version of the image, so zsync should save a lot of
bandwidth, but does not require running an rsync server.
Happy hacking.
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