Using Kiwi to deploy Debian/Ubuntu based images

[Manfred Hollstein]

Hi there,

$SUBJECT has been brought up already, and Marcus kindly responded to me
in private e-mail, so I thought I'd briefly summarize my request and the
status.

# What do I want? #

I want to be able to produce VM images which can be deployed into the
OpenStack based cloud run at the Telekom department where I'm employed.
So far so good, wouldn't there be the OS we are using here... It's
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and 14.04 LTS, so we need support for Debian based
packaging. The VMs are currently configured and patched during the
bootstrap phase, which makes installing updates pretty complex. I'd
therefore like the idea to be able to create the image offline using
Kiwi and then simply to boot the up2date VM... and have fun ;) Or to
create Docker images if someone wants to use containers, ...

# What have I achieved so far? #

Marcus told me that the following two packages "hwinfo" and "kiwi-tools"
need to be installable as .deb packages. "hwinfo" is available in my PPA
at <https://launchpad.net/~manfred-h-m/+archive/ubuntu/trusty>, but Kiwi
itself has only been built locally so far - I really can't say I like
the Debian packing format...

I can create a VM file system image for Debian 8.2 based on the files
which had been referenced here and which I modified for the most current
Debian version.

I also tried to build an image for Ubuntu, but the released ISOs
apparently use a very different structure than the Debian ISO, so I had
to use the online repository at <source
path="http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/"/> to get somewhere. When it
comes to configuring the boot loader, the invoked "grub" installation
script sits there and waits indefinitely for interactive
configuration... Attaching to the screen session didn't help. "apt-get"
should probably get some environment variables instructing it to run in
batch mode.

Running "./kiwi -h" shows that kiwi uses Digest::SHA which is deprecated
(and not available) on Ubuntu. I have replaced the references with
Digest::SHA1 to fix the problem on Ubuntu. I understand that Digest::SHA
is available on *SuSE*, but shouldn't we upgrade to SHA1 for all
platforms? What do others think?

Before I'm going to start sending patches, I just wanted to check if
other people around here have similar requirements, or if this
completely off scope.

Cheers.

l8er
manfred

[Manfred Hollstein]

Hi there,

On Wed, 28 Oct 2015, 12:17:36 +0100, Manfred Hollstein wrote:
> [...]

> Marcus told me that the following two packages "hwinfo" and "kiwi-tools"
> need to be installable as .deb packages. "hwinfo" is available in my PPA

> at <https://launchpad.net/~manfred-h-m/+archive/ubuntu/trusty>, ...

quick update: I built hwinfo-21.23 for trusty (14.04) and precise
(12.04). The packages can be found here:

<https://launchpad.net/~manfred-h-m/+archive/ubuntu/precise>
<https://launchpad.net/~manfred-h-m/+archive/ubuntu/trusty>

One remark: I tried to upload the debian'ized files to OBS, but for
12.04 the build-requires: libx86emu-dev is missing in the Ubuntu 12.04
distribution in OBS. I could create an arbitrary package myself, but
before uploading stuff to OBS I thought I'd ask ;)

Cheers.

l8er
manfred