• Launchpad Entry: mobile-arm-karmic-offline-installer-gui

• Created: 2009-06-11

• Contributors: OliverGrawert

• Packages affected:

Summary

To build a rootfs tarball for armel based systems that match the ARMv7 standard but are not supported by any prebuilt image in ubuntu we currently provide a qemu wrapper script that sets up and configures a system using a script. The existing wrapper needs to be packaged and enhanced with GUI elements (i.e. oem-config) that take responsibility for a proper system setup which does not differ from a standard ubuntu installation so that the currently used setup script can be replaced.

Release Note

The new Ubuntu Offline Builder enables you to create a completely configured tarball for your ARMv7 system to be extracted on a rootdevice. The installed system does not differ from any other Ubuntu 9.10 installation.

Rationale

Ubuntu only supports a minimal set of ARMv7 hardware. To enable a broader community the RootfsFromScratch setup was invented in 9.04. The wrapper script used to set up a standard Ubuntu system inside a virtual machine currently does not produce a 100% identical setup to a normal image that was installed by debian-installer or ubiquity. The target of this spec is to enhance the existing wrapper to use standard tools to set up a system as close to a normal install as possible.

Design

• A GUI frontend to the existing script will be created that enables the user to modify a subset of the commandline options the existing script uses (output format, task selection etc).
• If a desktop system is chosen for installation inside the image an X session will be started completely transparently inside the VM to run oem-config this will be integrated into the running desktop session by either spawning a VNC connection to the VM or running a later to be uninstalled ssh server to which the running desktop connects via ssh X forwarding.
• The GUI will offer a way to save the selected configuration.
• Preparation for later kernel inclusion.

Implementation

• The GUI will be implemented in pygtk and call original script as subprocess
  • Options
    • Read/write cfg file...
    • Mirror selection
    • Task selection or alternatively spawn synaptic inside the VM
    • Image size
    • Component selection
    • Hostname, login name, passwd will be set through spawning oem-config inside the VM
    • Output format (tarball or qemu image)
    • Logfile
    • --keep-image, --notarball options of existing script

Test/Demo Plan

• Build an image and run it on an ARMv7 system.

Unresolved issues

• Should kernel inclusion be possible, if so, how should handling unpackaged kernels be solved ?
• Why did we not consider vmbuilder
  • Has different target use cases (cloud, dedicated appliance, multiple vm backend)
  • KVM bound (no qemu arm support in KVM)
  • Different output formats (live iso, portable vm specific backends), not root images for usb/raw use....
  • Bundles kernels while we want only a rootfs

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