Hi all, I'd like to help speed up development on the freedombox's various software by using three established open-source tools to create virtual machines that can be easily distributed, destroyed and recreated.
I can create a base OS install using veewee https://github.com/jedi4ever/veewee All you need for it is ruby, virtualbox, the veewee gem. This tool can: - create a base OS just as if you'd install it from a PXE server. It allows in depth customization After I've created the OS, it can be packaged into a .box file and people can use it as base box with the next tool. The second tool is vagrant https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant All you need for this tool is ruby, virtualbox, vagrant gem This tool can take the .box file and use it to create a Virtualbox virtual machine programmatically.(you have a text file where you specify no of cpus, amount of ram , etc) In conjunction with a tool like puppet http://puppetlabs.com/ ( configuration management tool ) it will allow for the cycle of creation -- hacking -- destroy of a virtual machine without losing the state of your work, and without needing to keep all the vms in the world on your hard-drive. I'm aware that these tools won't help low level kernel hackers. It will help people working on other software that work on top of the OS layer: eg privoxy, monkeysphere, etc How will these tools help speed up development ? 1. First you'd create a base OS using veewee. I haven't investigated how well it works with freedom-maker. I've used it to create a debian VM from a debian 6 netinstall iso with a preseed file. 2. Secondly you'd write a Vagrant file , and put it on a web server together with the .box file. At the moment that people install vagrant and download the Vagrant file, vagrant will download the .box file and create a Virtualbox VM from it. Vagrant only downloads the .box file the first time. All people will have, at this point, the same base OS , with the same packages, kernel version, etc 3. As an additional layer for people working on lets say privoxy, you'd have puppet code that will ensure all of them, after bringing the previous vagrant box up would have the same privoxy version, same conf files, same iptable rules, etc on top of the OS version established at point 2.(the puppet code will be applied by vagrant automatically) These 3 steps mean that anyone wanting to hack on privoxy, would, in 10 minutes, get a VM up and running the current state of the OS and the current state of the github project for privoxy. Let me know if you think this is a helpful idea for the freedombox project. Regards, Stefan _______________________________________________ Freedombox-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss
