[Ubuntu-US-CA] ISO Handling Tips

[Grant Bowman]

Here are a few tips for handling ISO images. It occurred to me during
the Berkeley Global Jam yesterday that I hadn't shared these tips yet.

Testdrive https://launchpad.net/testdrive is a more automated way of
downloading and setting up virtual machines for testing pre-release
versions of Ubuntu. By default it uses KVM but can also use
Virtualbox. I've used it's default file locations to make my other
tips compatible, using the same ISO images.

When I want to update a desktop 32 bit or 64 bit ISO daily build image
I run some simple bash aliases I store in ~/.bash_aliases that get
sourced by .bashrc. These can be modified to use zsync (client side
rsync) or to download other images. To use them just type
"syncnatty;syncnatty64" and they will be run in sequence. The rsync
and zsync download methods only download changes to the ISO file since
the last time you downloaded it.

     alias syncnatty='rsync -azP
rsync://cdimage.ubuntu.com/cdimage/daily-live/current/natty-desktop-i386.iso
$HOME/.cache/testdrive/natty-desktop-i386.iso'
     alias syncnatty64='rsync -azP
rsync://cdimage.ubuntu.com/cdimage/daily-live/current/natty-desktop-amd64.iso
$HOME/.cache/testdrive/natty-desktop-amd64.iso'

The next tip is setting grub2 to boot my machine from those ISO images
without needing to write them to a USB stick or burn them to CDs.  In
the file /etc/grub.d/40_custom I wrote customized entries (thanks
again to http://rww.name/articles/grub2iso.html ) to boot them. You
will need to modify these to use your username instead of "grantbow"
below. I believe the acpi=off is something my hardware needs and may
not be required.

menuentry "ubuntu-11.04-desktop-i386 iso" {
        loopback loop /home/grantbow/.cache/testdrive/natty-desktop-i386.iso
        linux (loop)/casper/vmlinuz boot=casper
iso-scan/filename=/home/grantbow/.cache/testdrive/natty-desktop-i386.iso
noreject noprompt acpi=off --
        initrd (loop)/casper/initrd.lz
}
menuentry "ubuntu-11.04-desktop-amd64 iso" {
        loopback loop /home/grantbow/.cache/testdrive/natty-desktop-amd64.iso
        linux (loop)/casper/vmlinuz boot=casper
iso-scan/filename=/home/grantbow/.cache/testdrive/natty-desktop-amd64.iso
noreject noprompt acpi=off --
        initrd (loop)/casper/initrd.lz
}

These tips cover testing in virtual machines or on the hardware
directly making running the latest version more accessible without
requiring a full install. I hope others find these tips helpful.

Cheers,

Grant