[PSA] ChromiumOS artifacts now available to the world (e.g. x86-generic/amd64-generic)

[Mike Frysinger]

moving forward, the tip of tree (ToT) build artifacts from the public
manifest will be marked with public read ACLs. we most likely won't
retroactively do this (simply because we're lazy), but who wants old
software anyways.

these are baby steps for us, and we hope it'll foster more community
involvement. rather than random people on the net producing & hosting
their own builds of ChromiumOS, you can grab the amd64-generic or
x86-generic builds that we're already building & hosting. so if you
have fixes/improvements for the generic builds, then by getting them
merged into the main tree, everyone easily benefits.

this doesn't mean open season on getting anything & everything you
might want in ChromiumOS merged of course. new packages and features
still go through the same review/approval process.

you can simply browse to the waterfall:
http://build.chromium.org/p/chromiumos/waterfall

pick a builder:
http://build.chromium.org/p/chromiumos/builders/amd64%20generic%20full

pick one of its builds:
http://build.chromium.org/p/chromiumos/builders/amd64%20generic%20full/builds/6980

and look at the Artifacts link at the bottom:
https://storage.cloud.google.com/chromeos-image-archive/amd64-generic-full/R27-3808.0.0-b6980/index.html
(it might ask you to log in ... not sure why, but any random Google
account should work)

then you'll be presented with all the artifacts that the builder
produced. most people will probably be interested in the
chromiumos_base_image.tar.xz or recovery_image.tar.xz as those contain
the base/recovery images respectively.

note that not every builder produces a "full" set of images. some
(like the incremental builders) only produce test images. not a bug !
-mike

[Richard Barnette]

On Mar 7, 2013, at 5:42 PM, Mike Frysinger <vap...@chromium.org> wrote:

> moving forward, the tip of tree (ToT) build artifacts from the public
> manifest will be marked with public read ACLs. we most likely won't
> retroactively do this (simply because we're lazy), but who wants old
> software anyways.
>

Looking at the currently published images, it seems that there are
only base and test images. Lots of folks seem to prefer dev images
over base images (cf. all the interest in "dev_install"). Has there
been any thought given to including dev images?

Also, it's probably worth calling out that "test" images aren't
secure, and generally shouldn't be installed.

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-- jrb

[Mike Frysinger]

On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 6:21 PM, Richard Barnette wrote:

> On Mar 7, 2013, at 5:42 PM, Mike Frysinger wrote:
>> moving forward, the tip of tree (ToT) build artifacts from the public
>> manifest will be marked with public read ACLs. we most likely won't
>> retroactively do this (simply because we're lazy), but who wants old
>> software anyways.
>
> Looking at the currently published images, it seems that there are
> only base and test images.

the change i landed was straight forward -- just updating the ACLs and
generating an index. nothing else about our bot flow has changed. i
highlighted at the end of the msg that not every bot produces every
image type. some don't even produce 'base' images.

> Lots of folks seem to prefer dev images
> over base images (cf. all the interest in "dev_install"). Has there
> been any thought given to including dev images?

this would be an easy change to make (add 'dev' to the images list in
cbuildbot_config.py). we however don't do this for any existing
boards, so it'd be something new.

not saying i'm against it, just that it's new ground, and should
probably get tossed around a little to see if it's something we want
to do.
-mike

[Chris Sosa]

Yes, a separate thread. However, in short:

We build artifacts that are most useful for us to validate our build.
Dev images while most useful for developers don't add much value for
validating the image.

[Trever]

Whoa!  Wait- what!?

For those of us coming from the Chrome OS world who are too lazy or otherwise busy and/or lack the equipment to have done our own builds *yet* (I outgrew having build servers in my closet years ago, sorry- keep that sh*t at work these days) I'm not sure I'm understanding this.  Have I had to much beer?  Wait, I haven't had any beer.  This seems VERY cool guys...  And if I have a modicum of a clue here as to what exactly you're announcing (couched in Chromium OS build geek speak! :-), this is certainly huge.

On this page:

http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromium-os-faq

It says:  "Chromium OS is the open source project, used primarily by developers, with code that is available for anyone to checkout, modify, and build."

Sounds like you're saying that's got to be updated to:

Chromium OS is the open source project, used primarily by developers, with code that is available for anyone to checkout, modify, and build.  Or for x86 architectures, download a pre-built image and simply install it and run.

Yes?

This is totally freaking huge, if I'm understanding it correctly.  Awesome!  I think...

Re baby steps...

I'm wondering what the relationship is between the downloaded images (if I haven't totally misunderstood here), and this here part:

"Chromium OS does not auto-update (so that changes you may have made to the code are not blown away), whereas Google Chrome OS seamlessly auto-updates so that users have the latest and greatest features and fixes."

Could it be that you'd turn on auto-updates for these public builds?  This gets into stuff I'm on the cusp of digging into myself, so pardon my ignorance.

So maybe baby steps but are you going to announce this elsewhere eventually?

Or have I misunderstood somehow, because I haven't had any beer?

Trever

[Trever]

Er, terrible follow on habit, sorry.

But I neglected to say that the feedback loop here that you suggest re community is the even bigger part here.  Not just "Yay!  Give me a binary!".

[Mike Frysinger]

On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 2:52 AM, Trever <trr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm wondering what the relationship is between the downloaded images (if I
> haven't totally misunderstood here), and this here part:
> "Chromium OS does not auto-update (so that changes you may have made to the
> code are not blown away), whereas Google Chrome OS seamlessly auto-updates
> so that users have the latest and greatest features and fixes."
>
> Could it be that you'd turn on auto-updates for these public builds? This
> gets into stuff I'm on the cusp of digging into myself, so pardon my
> ignorance.

no, there is no auto-updater running for these builds, and there's
multiple reasons why this is.

first, the builds don't enable it. the public builds don't produce
ChromeOS images, just ChromiumOS images, and our scripts detect this
scenario when initializing /etc/lsb-release. you can see it here:
http://git.chromium.org/gitweb/?p=chromiumos/overlays/chromiumos-overlay.git;a=blob;f=chromeos/scripts/cros_set_lsb_release

second, even if that file were fixed to point to Google's update
service, we'd hit the next problem: the Google update service will
only give back stuff it knows about. we've only enabled it for
official boards, so any other value gets rejected immediately.

third, even if we updated the configs to know about these boards, it
still needs something to serve. we don't put ChromiumOS images in the
same bucket as ChromeOS images, and we don't run the payload
generation service on them (which is how you can upgrade from one
version to the next by only fetching the deltas rather than the entire
image).

there might be other reasons i'm not thinking of.

of course, nothing is stopping people from fetching these images and
running their own update service :)

> So maybe baby steps but are you going to announce this elsewhere eventually?

announce what ? auto-upgrading for ChromiumOS ? i'm not aware of any
plans to implement that (see above for the technical limitations).
-mike

[Trever]

On Monday, March 11, 2013 3:00:35 PM UTC-7, Mike Frysinger wrote:

announce what ?  auto-upgrading for ChromiumOS ?  i'm not aware of any
plans to implement that (see above for the technical limitations).
-mike

Unless I misunderstand this announcement, I think most would say that making these binary builds available is significant by itself, with or without auto-upgrading.  Based on a posting that Olof made earlier today on his G+, I'm more confident I do understand what you've done here.

Simple example: the only way to try Chromium OS previously was to download the source and build it yourself or get HEX or similar build.  Gee.  That's an issue.  I could probably talk my girl friend through downloading and installing Ubuntu.  But maybe not.  Could I talk her through doing the same for Chromium OS before your announcement?  Forget about it. 

But even for technical people, the barrier has been high to simply *try* Chromium OS.  No thumb drive test image, etc..

Now (you're saying) installable binary images are available from the project source, where source means hosting source.  Maybe it even means Google, whatever.  As you've said, you hope this fosters more community involvement.  So it's a significant step.  

The posting went right past me because I scanned something about artifacts...  that may be the technical term, but really, you're making very useable Chromium OS binaries available for the first time.  Right?

Note: there was some sort of snafu-  if this should turn out to be a repeat posting, apologies.

[Mike Frysinger]

On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 7:15 PM, Trever <trr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Now (you're saying) installable binary images are available from the project
> source, where source means hosting source. Maybe it even means Google,
> whatever. As you've said, you hope this fosters more community involvement.
> So it's a significant step.
>
> The posting went right past me because I scanned something about
> artifacts... that may be the technical term, but really, you're making very
> useable Chromium OS binaries available for the first time. Right?

the .bin images are now publicly available. not sure there is any
useful UI tool though for managing the process of getting this onto a
device (USB thumb drive or otherwise).
-mike

[Trever]

On Tuesday, March 12, 2013 2:11:35 PM UTC-7, Mike Frysinger wrote:

the .bin images are now publicly available.  not sure there is any
useful UI tool though for managing the process of getting this onto a
device (USB thumb drive or otherwise).
-mike

dd should work though, I presume. 

[Chris Sosa]

Indeed (image_to_usb.sh is just a big happy wrapper for dd)

[Mike Frysinger]

On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 6:18 PM, Trever <trr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday, March 12, 2013 2:11:35 PM UTC-7, Mike Frysinger wrote:
>> the .bin images are now publicly available. not sure there is any
>> useful UI tool though for managing the process of getting this onto a
>> device (USB thumb drive or otherwise).
>

> dd should work though, I presume.

sure. but most people don't consider dd user friendly ;).
-mike

[Luigi Semenzato]

For one thing, it doesn't have the nice progress bar.

> -mike

[Bill Richardson]

Linux is very user friendly. It's just picky about who its friends are.

On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 3:20 PM, Mike Frysinger <vap...@chromium.org> wrote:

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[Trever]

Now that Bill Richardson has done it, I'll feel free to top post...   :-)

Any geek or geek wannabe interested in trying out ChromiumOS might easily figure out dd.  But (I submit) those people aren't going to associate "ChromiumOS artifacts" with "ChromiumOS binaries now available".  

In general, anyone who might venture down the path of installing an OS called "ChromiumOS" on their machine is who we're talking about here, I'd say.

If you want to remain coy and insist that no "announcement" is in order here ("announce what?", he says), that's okay by me.  It just adds to the experience.

No complaints from me.  I just wanted to make sure I was understanding the email (don't call it an announcement!) that started this thread.

I feel satisfied.  :-)

Trever

[Tim Liverton]

Thanks for making the builds available. What's the password for installing Chromium OS onto internal hard drive? I can successfully boot up, use chromium os on flash drive, open terminal emulator (Ctrl + Alt + T), and typed "install" command but don't know which password to use