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Providing official virtualisation images of Debian



Hi,
I believe it's high time we start to providing Debian in form of official
virtualisation images. In contrast to the ISOs currently provided it
allows a quicker evaluation/testing of Debian (and can also be very
useful for testing (e.g. someone wrote on debian-release that he doesn't have
access to oldstable/stable systems, with prepared virtualisation
images that would no longer be an issue). For many setups this could even
replace the installer since software selection and hostname can easily
be tweaked post-install.

I think it's sufficient for starters to provide images for stable
(they can be updated for every few point updates if needed).

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?

How should the images be generated? IMO the images would need to be
created by a DD and to provide at least some form of trust path validation
we could provide PGP signed hashes of the download images. Maybe some
virtualisation solutions also provide their own validation mechanisms.

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.

Cheers,
        Moritz











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