[CoLoCo] JeOS

[Neal McBurnett]

On Thu, Nov 01, 2007 at 11:59:29AM -0700, Neal McBurnett wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 09, 2007 at 09:06:00AM -0600, Kevin Fries wrote:
> > On Tue, 2007-10-09 at 10:27 -0400, Michael Haney wrote:
> > > On 10/9/07, Kevin Fries <kfries at cctus.com> wrote:
> > > > Has anyone tried JeOS ("Juice") yet?  Impressions?
> > 
> > JeOS is an Ubuntu flavor designed for VMs.
> > 
> > http://www.ubuntu.com/news/ubuntu-jeos
> > 
> > We use VMware quite a bit around here.  And some of may remember from
> > the Ubuntucon that I run a VM of Windows on my Ubuntu laptop to have
> > access to Visio.  So virtualization is a big issue around here.
> > 
> > I would love to know if anyone else tried this and their impressions,
> > gotcha lists, neat feature list, etc before I start digging in myself.
> 
> Sitting here at UDS-Boston, I hear the gutsy version of JeOS will be
> out "real soon now" in the standard repos :-) See also
> 
>  https://launchpad.net/ubuntu-jeos/
> 
> for the ubuntu-jeos-builder code.

There is a pretty active forum thread here on jeos, which
gets more helpful around page 4:

 http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=549222&page=4

I've had good luck with the builder script in ubuntu-jeos.
Only about 2 minutes to build and start running a fresh new
custom VM under qemu!

I uploaded my own "nealmcb" branch with qemu support:

https://code.launchpad.net/~nealmcb/ubuntu-jeos/nealmcb

You can just browse that code base and grab the ubuntu-jeos-builder
shell script and run it anywhere, after getting the dependencies
(qemu, debootstrap, parted).  But the code didn't make it in time for
gutsy, so someone (maybe me :-) should put it up in a ppa so folks can
just install it like normal....

This is a command line I've used with that (after installing
apt-catcher which caches apts and dramatically speeds up subsequent
apt-gets that debootstrap does). It uses ts (from the moreutils
package) to timestamp each line of output:

sudo ubuntu-jeos-builder -t /dev/shm --addpkg openssh-server --mirror http://localhost:3142/archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu --vm qemu 2>&1 | ts %H:%M:%S > jb.out

cd ubuntu-jeos-gutsy-i386
./launchjeos -redir tcp:2222::22 -monitor stdio

ssh ubuntu at localhost -p 2222

A "jeos" iso will be showing up in gutsy at some point, but I don't
recommend it - a relatively slow, painful install with cdrom
workarounds etc.

Cheers,

Neal McBurnett                 http://mcburnett.org/neal/