[Neurodebian-devel] fresh wheezy-based NeuroDebian VM images (todo or not todo)?

[Yaroslav Halchenko]

Hi Yury,

btw -- have a look at https://github.com/jedi4ever/veewee/ besides being
written in Ruby (and there is no neat debian package yet) -- it might be
a replacement for our ad-hoc script for different VM images
generation since it accomplishes our workflow, just in a
systematic way.  If only could it be extended to generate live images as
well... ? ;)

On Tue, 11 Dec 2012, Yury V. Zaytsev wrote:

> Hi yoh,

> On Tue, 2012-12-11 at 13:27 -0500, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote: 
> > FWIW -- I have pushed my slight refinements on top of Tiziano's
> > changes just to make wheezy VMs build -- enh/wheezy-vm on alioth:

> > http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-exppsy/neurodebian.git

> > Theoretically it could still be used to build "stable" squeeze VMs
> > but I haven't tried yet.

> I had a look at your scripts a couple of months ago; did I get it right
> that you basically script around vbox to make a vm, install it from a
> generated preseed and populate with neurodebian packages?

> I have now finally published my Ubuntu live media remastering scripts:

>     https://github.com/nest/livecd-scripts

> What I'm basically doing here is to take a stock Ubuntu LTS i386 ISO
> (for maximum compatibility), unpack it, populate with neurodebian
> packages and manually compiled code, update the packages and re-pack it
> into an ISO back again.

> Then I'm loading the ISO into a vbox vm, where I use USB Creator to
> generate an aufs-based hard drive with like 4G of space (which is more
> than enough, since people don't store data inside the vm anyways).
> Exactly the same procedure is then used to create stateful USB live
> media.

> So out of one master I get 

>   1) stateless DVDs,
>   2) stateful USB drives and
>   3) stateful vm,

> which is good because the work is only done once and I 
> get 3 mostly identical live medias out of it, which covers the
> requirements of most schools, courses, conferences, etc.

> Now I don't particularly like this solution, because it still involves
> quite some manual work upon rebuilds.

> As you know I'm working on doing away with make install by trying to
> open source and package the relevant bits, so once everything hits
> neurodebian, the customizing work is gone.

> However, beyond that, there is still a problem in that I depend on
> pre-built master Ubuntu images and even though re-packing is automated,
> it still requires some manual intervention...

> I'm wondering how much manual work does your solution involve upon
> rebuilds? (Please give an honest answer ;-) I know it's 'minimal')

> Do you think we can somehow join our forces or you would see my project
> as completely orthogonal to what you are doing?

> What is important for me is also to have live DVDs and USB sticks, do
> you think those can be automatically derived from your vm?

> I can post the links to the VMs and ISOs so that you can have a look at
> what the result looks like...

> > also -- this one uses XFCE4 as the desktop, so things remain
> > fluent/lightweight in the VM.

> So didn't Joey's voluntaristic xfce-ization get reverted recently? :o)
-- 
Yaroslav O. Halchenko
Postdoctoral Fellow,   Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences
Dartmouth College, 419 Moore Hall, Hinman Box 6207, Hanover, NH 03755
Phone: +1 (603) 646-9834                       Fax: +1 (603) 646-1419
WWW:   http://www.linkedin.com/in/yarik