[OLPC-Chicago] vmware images

[Ian Bicking]

I was going to try to make vmware images with all the software we 
wanted, including samba and nfs servers and clients.  (Mike has been 
working some on this too, and he made the Gentoo image some of you 
tried, so I thought I'd copy him too.)

I kind of got this working.  Making a .vmdk vmware disk image is easy. 
Grab one of these images:

http://olpc.download.redhat.com/olpc/streams/development/LATEST-STABLE-BUILD/devel_ext3/

Take the .img file, and run:

   qemu-img convert olpc-redhat-stream-development-devel_ext3.img \
            -O vmdk olpc-devel.vmdk

qemu is available as a package on any Linux system.  Qemu is available 
on Windows too, but I've had a hard time with it.  I'd suggest running 
this on any Linux computer at your disposal instead of futzing with Windows.

The vmdk file unfortunately is not enough, you need a .vmx file. 
There's a generator for these files at: http://dcgrendel.be/vmbuilder/

I found the particular settings that are important is that you want to 
set the ide0 filename to olpc-devel.vmdk, and writeThrough and 
startConnected to TRUE.  Most of the other settings don't seem to matter 
much, except that the default memory setting is too low.  I've attached 
what I have.

Unfortunately, though, I haven't gotten any networking to work.  I 
thought vmxnet drivers were enabled in the latest build, but I don't 
know.  None of the driver options seemed to work.  When using the ISO 
with vmware I didn't have any networking problems, so I don't know 
what's the issue.  If there's some package I have to install, doing it 
through qemu then creating the vmware image would be easy enough.

Incidentally, once I had samba-client installed it was fairly simple to 
share a directory with my host system.  Probably NFS would be easier on 
Linux (not sure which is easier on Mac), but having both installed is 
easy enough.


-- 
Ian Bicking | ianb at colorstudy.com | http://blog.ianbicking.org
             | Write code, do good | http://topp.openplans.org/careers
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