Hi, I believe it's high time we start to providing Debian in form of official virtualisation images. In contrast to the ISOs currently provided it allows a quicker evaluation/testing of Debian (and can also be very useful for testing (e.g. someone wrote on debian-release that he doesn't have access to oldstable/stable systems, with prepared virtualisation images that would no longer be an issue). For many setups this could even replace the installer since software selection and hostname can easily be tweaked post-install.
I think it's sufficient for starters to provide images for stable (they can be updated for every few point updates if needed). What virtualisation solutions should be supported? - Virtual Box seems like a natural candidate since it's free and included since Squeeze. - Vmware has a significant installed base and is relevant, although proprietary - Microsoft Virtual PC is likely also needed - Qemu - Citrix XenServer? How should the images be generated? IMO the images would need to be created by a DD and to provide at least some form of trust path validation we could provide PGP signed hashes of the download images. Maybe some virtualisation solutions also provide their own validation mechanisms. Do people think this is relevant and are willing to work on providing one of the images? If so, we could arrange a BoF at DebConf. Cheers, Moritz -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/slrnj2rrdt.3tm....@inutil.org