[Sugar-devel] [SoaS] Progress on the Virtual Appliance

[Sebastian Dziallas]

Dave Bauer wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 11, 2009 at 12:13 PM, Sebastian Dziallas <sebastian at when.com 
> <mailto:sebastian at when.com>> wrote:
> 
>     Hi folks,
> 
>     I'm happy to report some progress over the weekend on the SoaS
>     appliance. Finally, it turned out that some live media bits were
>     accidentally included in the recent builds, which caused them not to
>     boot. This has been fixed and I can confirm it now to boot into Sugar
>     here. It's probably alpha quality right now and contains quite some
>     issues:
> 
>     * It runs firstboot when you start it for the first time. maybe we can
>     circumvent this? If not, we need a skin for firstboot.
> 
>     * We can automatically download activities from a.sl.o and include them,
>     but they won't appear, as we can't link them to the /home directory,
>     because that get's created in firstboot.
> 
>     * The current version does NOT work in VMware Fusion. This is a known
>     issue and will be fixed once we resume building.
> 
>     So, please note: I just built this over the weekend to sort this out.
>     You can grab it nevertheless, but I wouldn't expect it to be around much
>     long after newer snapshots appeared on dl.sl.o.
> 
>     Here's the link: http://people.sugarlabs.org/sdz/soas2-20090411.tar.gz
> 
>     Thanks to all those who continuously tried the images!
> 
>     To those who celebrate it, happy Easter!
> 
> 
> Thanks, this is great news! Does the appliance include vmware tools?
> 
> Dave

Actually not. Well, I've lost track of the vmware-tools development, but 
  it seems like they've recently open-sourced them. Downside is that 
those won't get in Fedora: 
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=294341

http://open-vm-tools.wiki.sourceforge.net/Distro+Package+Status

We could get it from RPM Fusion, though:

http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/development/i386/os/repoview/open-vm-tools.html

The biggest problem would be that this requires the installation of 
additional kernel modules and - which could be imo a blocker - that 
VMware Fusion for the Mac is NOT free.

So we might want to consider VirtualBox as a (better) alternative, as 
this is free for Linux, Mac and Windows. But for that, we don't have any 
RPM for the additions around, so this would need to be packaged first.

And I don't know about:

* the license; so I'm not even sure if we'd be allowed to package and 
redistribute them (it sounds like you'd only get the permission to 
distribute an ISO or to include the stuff at build time, but IANAL!).

* how to package it, as we'd probably need additional kernel modules 
(which are - afaik - not permitted in Fedora and would go in some 
third-party repository like RPM Fusion then) and other stuff.

So this sounds all a bit complicated...

--Sebastian