[Neurodebian-devel] fresh wheezy-based NeuroDebian VM images (todo or not todo)?

[Yury V. Zaytsev]

Hi yoh,

On Tue, 2012-12-11 at 13:27 -0500, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote: 
> FWIW -- I have pushed my slight refinements on top of Tiziano's
> changes just to make wheezy VMs build -- enh/wheezy-vm on alioth:
> 
> http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-exppsy/neurodebian.git
> 
> Theoretically it could still be used to build "stable" squeeze VMs
> but I haven't tried yet.

I had a look at your scripts a couple of months ago; did I get it right
that you basically script around vbox to make a vm, install it from a
generated preseed and populate with neurodebian packages?

I have now finally published my Ubuntu live media remastering scripts:

    https://github.com/nest/livecd-scripts

What I'm basically doing here is to take a stock Ubuntu LTS i386 ISO
(for maximum compatibility), unpack it, populate with neurodebian
packages and manually compiled code, update the packages and re-pack it
into an ISO back again.

Then I'm loading the ISO into a vbox vm, where I use USB Creator to
generate an aufs-based hard drive with like 4G of space (which is more
than enough, since people don't store data inside the vm anyways).
Exactly the same procedure is then used to create stateful USB live
media.

So out of one master I get 

  1) stateless DVDs,
  2) stateful USB drives and
  3) stateful vm,

which is good because the work is only done once and I 
get 3 mostly identical live medias out of it, which covers the
requirements of most schools, courses, conferences, etc.

Now I don't particularly like this solution, because it still involves
quite some manual work upon rebuilds.

As you know I'm working on doing away with make install by trying to
open source and package the relevant bits, so once everything hits
neurodebian, the customizing work is gone.

However, beyond that, there is still a problem in that I depend on
pre-built master Ubuntu images and even though re-packing is automated,
it still requires some manual intervention...

I'm wondering how much manual work does your solution involve upon
rebuilds? (Please give an honest answer ;-) I know it's 'minimal')

Do you think we can somehow join our forces or you would see my project
as completely orthogonal to what you are doing?

What is important for me is also to have live DVDs and USB sticks, do
you think those can be automatically derived from your vm?

I can post the links to the VMs and ISOs so that you can have a look at
what the result looks like...

> also -- this one uses XFCE4 as the desktop, so things remain
> fluent/lightweight in the VM.

So didn't Joey's voluntaristic xfce-ization get reverted recently? :o)

-- 
Sincerely yours,
Yury V. Zaytsev