[Freedombox-discuss] Building Freedombox to run under KVM

[Petter Reinholdtsen]

[Tim Retout]
> Hi all,

Hi.

> Recently I have been checking out freedom-maker.

So have I. :)

> I don't have a Dreamplug, and I'm not a fan of Virtualbox.  :) It
> seems that Debian's virtualbox package was moved into "contrib" before
> wheezy, because it needs a proprietary compiler to build the BIOS
> firmware.

Similar to my situation, but I happen to have several old laptops lying
around, so I decided to take a different route.  Instead of rewriting
the freedom-maker build framework to build a new image type, I am
rewriting it to move host setup to a separate deb, and do the setup
after installing it in the chroot (and on first boot).  This way I can
install a normal base installation on the machine I want, install the
setup package and run the setup script to configure the freedombox on
the machine.

When I am done I expect one can install a freedombox using the normal
debian-installer and a preseed file to pull in the setup package.  It
would work on laptops, Raspian, KVM virtual machines and anything else
where Debian can be installed.

I've sent some prerequisite patches as pull requests to github, and hope
they can be reviewed and accepted soon.  I'll publish the complete
rewrite soon too.  Just working on creating a git branch explaining in
more details the changes done, to make the rewrite easier to review.

> So, this makes me think that I should split out the VM image
> generation in the Makefile, and create a new KVM target.

It is one option, but it might be more convenient to use a normal Debian
ISO and a preseed file.

-- 
Happy hacking
Petter Reinholdtsen