[fedora-virt] P2V and grub bootloader

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Fri, May 01, 2009 at 01:40:13PM +0200, Emre Erenoglu wrote:
> On Fri, May 1, 2009 at 10:34 AM, Richard W.M. Jones <rjones at redhat.com>wrote:
> > While it's possible to get libguestfs working on F10, it's not
> > our minimum target, which is F11.
> >
> > In particular on F10 you will need to get the F11/F12 versions of the
> > following packages:
> >
> >  febootstrap >= 1.7
> >  fakechroot >= 2.9-22
> >  fakeroot >= 1.12.2
> >  qemu >= 0.10-7
> 
> I would like to use libguestfs in my distro, but is the dependency to
> debootstrap mandatory? (as my distro is not Fedora?)

Not sure if you misspelled 'febootstrap' there or if you really
mean debootstrap.

Anyhow it does need something like febootstrap/debootstrap,
ie. something which can build appliances as non-root.

So depending on your level of skill and free-software purity you have
several choices:

(1) Port febootstrap plus its deps to your distro.  Approximately
those deps would be: yum, python-rpm, fakeroot, fakechroot >= 2.9.

or:

(2) Port libguestfs to use debootstrap - if you're on Debian or Ubuntu
or another Debian derivative this would make most sense.  This is not
as much effort as it sounds, since febootstrap is loosely based on
debootstrap anyway.  Also because we have debootstrap in Fedora-land,
I can collaborate and test your patches.

or:

(3) Copy the binary blobs (the appliance) from /usr/lib64/guestfs in
the Fedora RPMs:

$ ll /usr/lib64/guestfs/
total 23968
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 21869259 2009-04-30 20:35 initramfs.fedora-10.x86_64.img
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root  2637056 2009-04-30 20:35 vmlinuz.fedora-10.x86_64

Choice (3) limits your freedom to modify the code and may have GPL
implications, so check the licenses carefully.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
virt-p2v converts physical machines to virtual machines.  Boot with a
live CD or over the network (PXE) and turn machines into Xen guests.
http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-p2v