[Freedombox-discuss] qemu squeeze armel image

[bertagaz at ptitcanardnoir.org]

On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 02:02:49PM +0100, Philip Hands wrote:
> On Sun, 10 Oct 2010 20:15:04 +0200, bertagaz at ptitcanardnoir.org wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I succesfully build a qemu image of a debian squeeze (armel arch).
> > 
> > As Lars seems to lack time to do this, I've prepared one. Point is that I
> > don't have a public webspace to put it on, so if someone here has some
> > spare place for it, please contact me to give the way to upload it.
> > 
> > It's actually a 512Mo cqow2 image, that I've partitionned as a LVM volume
> > so that it can be extended with another disk, sounded like close to what
> > was possible for a sheevaplug or so.
> 
> I can host that if people find it useful, although if that's a a vanilla
> install, I'd think it might be better to publish the recipe somehow
> (with as much of the install automated as possible) as that will give us
> a quicker download, and will give us a starting point on which to build
> a fully automated install, which is almost certainly going to be useful
> at some point.

Good point, I'll publish on the wiki the way to create such an image. I'll
try to put some preseeding too in the process, even if it won't be
possible to preseed stuff like the language.

That's an interesting starting point though, how would this automated
installation be done..? Preseeding could help, but we'd still need to have
some user input like for setting up the language. Or maybe provide a
default installed system image, and then the user would change some of the
settings we couldn't define during the build of this image (like language).

> Not that I'm trying to discourage you, as an image for everyone to work
> From might well be useful, and would provide a point of comparison for
> anyone subsequently coming up with auto-install stuff.

Yeah, I guess both are usefull, the documentation/preseeding for automated
installation/build tests, and prebuild images for people that want to work
on higher level stuffs, without spending too much time by installing a
system.

> So, send me a URL (and provide a GPG signature for the image) and I'll
> publish both for you.

Well, that's the point, if I had a URL, I would have send it here :) I'm
waiting for Bjarni to provide me a place where to publish it actually.

> BTW reasons to switch fairly rapidly to scripted installs include the
> fact that it's much easier to audit them, and also easier to build on
> one another's work if the scripts are kept in DVCS.  They can also act as
> a staging post for things that should really be in debconf, but aren't
> yet.

Yeah, as soon as some code will be necessary, I'll use DVCS.

> Cheers, Phil.
> -- 
> |)|  Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560]    http://www.hands.com/
> |-|  HANDS.COM Ltd.                    http://www.uk.debian.org/
> |(|  10 Onslow Gardens, South Woodford, London  E18 1NE  ENGLAND