Re: Providing official virtualisation images of Debian
>>>>> Moritz Mühlenhoff <jmm@inutil.org> writes:
> 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).
Most of the time, I'd prefer to use chroot'ed environments for
getting access to other Linux-based systems (with comparable
kernel versions.)
> For many setups this could even replace the installer since software
> selection and hostname can easily be tweaked post-install.
While I can't readily advocate for one approach or the other,
there certainly is an alternative.
Namely, example preseed files for common in-VM installation
scenarios may be provided (within a Debian package, in
particular.) Also, it could be made easy and straightforward to
select a preseed file external to the image itself from the
bootloader's menu.
Given a ready to use preseed file, installing Debian is a
matter of minutes (operator's time.)
Also, this way, the issue of authenticity checking is already
solved, and there's no need to waste any disk space to host
extra image files.
With Qemu (KVM), the process may be further simplified by
providing a tarball with the respective kernel and initramfs
images, and an (example) script to start the installer, in
addition to the preseed file. Since Qemu contains its own
kernel bootloader, which can be configured from the command
line, the process could be made almost fully-automated.
The other virtualization solutions may demand a configuration
file of a sort. The examples, templates, or generators of such
files may also be provided.
The only configuration option that I expect to often require
operator's attention would be the HTTP proxy URI.
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