Dear CentOS developers,
there is a demand for ready-to-boot virtual machine images for distros
like CentOS. Since i am an afinicado of CentOS and Xen, i would like to
build and maintain a CentOS5-image. Is centos.org interested in hosting
such a sub-project? Testing and tasting CentOS would get much easier, it
would help making CentOS more popular.
Planned features:
* support for several VMMs (Xen3, VMware player/workstation/server,
VirtualBox, UML, KVM, ...; maybe even VirtualPC ;-)
* Click&Run for win32-users:
1. download & install vmplayer
2. download & unzip CentOS-desktop-image.zip
3. double-click "centos.vmx"
* sparse flat disk image (most VMMs support this image format)
containing two or three partitions (swap, /, maybe /boot)
* kernels and initrds to run the image fully and para-virtualized
* Firstboot script (setting root-password and hostname)
* VMM config files, at least for the most popular VMMs (Xen/para,
Xen/HVM, VMware player)
* Documentation how to boot the image with those VMMs. Special notes
on kernel-xen and virt-manager (CentOS5, FC6)
* clean: never booted, empty /{tmp,var/{log,spool/mail,cache/*}}
* all changes to the pristine image (like customized /etc/fstab,
/etc/X11/xorg.conf) properly documented
Different flavors:
* arch: i386; maybe x86_64
* image: flat disk sparse; maybe flat filesystem sparse
* scope: "minimal" (networking, sshd, yum, vim, cron, syslog);
"standard desktop"; maybe "standard server"
* archive: sparse-aware .tar.bz2; .zip for win32 hosts
RoadMap:
* wait for CentOS5-beta2 ;-)
* create and post a minimal CentOS5-beta2 i386 image with xen- and
vmware configs, wait for reviews/bugreport
* create and post a standard desktop CentOS5-beta2 i386 image, wait
for reviews/bugreport
* if there are enough positive reports, repeat for CentOS5-final
* release when/if centos.org is pleased with the (bugfixed) images
Are you interested in such a project? I am eager for comments.
Regards, /nils.