Oz 0.10.0 release

I'm pleased to announce release 0.10.0 of Oz. Oz is a program for doing automated installation of guest operating systems with limited input from the user. Release 0.10.0 is a bugfix and feature release for Oz. Some of the highlights between Oz 0.9.0 and 0.10.0 are:

• Support for installing OpenSUSE 12.1 and 12.2
• Support for python3
• Support for Ubuntu 12.04.1, 12.04.2, and 12.10
• Fix up ordering so that commands are run in the order they are specified in the XML
• Updates and fixes to the documentation
• Increase the shutdown timeout to support slower qemu guests
• Add a default screenshot directory as /var/lib/oz/screenshots
• Support for RHEL 5.9
• Support for Fedora 18
• Switch over to pycurl for header information; this allows http authentication to work
• Switch to using the libvirt built-in screenshot mechanism. This removes the gvnc dependency and makes screenshots more reliable, but requires libvirt 0.9.7 or newer
• Delete auto-generated ssh keys after customization

A tarball of this release is available, as well as packages for Fedora-17. Instructions on how to get and use Oz are available at http://github.com/clalancette/oz/wiki . If you have questions or comments about Oz, please feel free to contact me at clalancette@gmail.com, or open up an issue on the github page: http://github.com/clalancette/oz/issues . Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release through bug reports, patches, and suggestions for improvement.

Oz 0.9.0 release

I'm pleased to announce release 0.9.0 of Oz. Oz is a program for doing automated installation of guest operating systems with limited input from the user.  Release 0.9.0 is a (long overdue) bugfix and feature release for Oz. Some of the highlights between Oz 0.8.0 and 0.9.0 are:

• Easier to create Debian/Ubuntu packages
• Ability to specify the disk size in the TDL
• Ability to specify the number of CPUs and amount of memory used for the installation VM
• Cleanup and bugfixes to oz-cleanup-cache
• Ability to install Fedora-17 disk images
• Ability to install guests as a non-root user.  This has several caveats; please see the documentation on http://github.com/clalancette/oz for more information
• Ability to install RHEL-6.3 disk images
• Ability to install ScientificLinuxCERN disk images
• Ability to install Mandrake 8.2 disk images
• Ability to install OpenSUSE 10.3 disk images
• Ability to install Ubuntu 12.04 disk images

A tarball of this release is available, as well as packages for Fedora-16. Instructions on how to get and use Oz are available at http://github.com/clalancette/oz .

If you have any questions or comments about Oz, please feel free to contact aeolus-devel@lists.fedorahosted.org or me (clalancette@gmail.com) directly.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release through bug reports, patches, and suggestions for improvement.

Oz 0.8.0 released

(this is a little delayed; sorry about that)

I'm pleased to announce release 0.8.0 of Oz. Oz is a program for doing automated installation of guest operating systems with limited input from the user.

Release 0.8.0 is a (long overdue) bugfix and feature release for Oz. Some of the highlights between Oz 0.7.0 and 0.8.0 are:

• Optional virtualenv make target


• Conversion of unittests to py.test


• Replace mkisofs with genisoimage


• Debian package


• Ability to change the root password for Debian installs


• Add unittests for ozutil


• Add some unittests for the Guest object


• SSH tunnel (with SSL vhost) support for local repositories (mostly useful for imagefactory)


• Add a new manpage for oz-examples


• Make the output filename configurable with a command-line option to oz-install


• Monitor both network and disk activity when looking for guest activity


• Support for installing Ubuntu 11.10


• Support for SSL certificates for repositories


• Support for an optional version in the TDL


• Support for installling Mandrake 9.1, 9.2, 10.0, 10.1, 10.2


• Support for installing Mandriva 2006.0, 2007.0, 2008.0


• Support for Ubuntu customization


• Support for installing RHEL 6.2

A tarball of this release is available, as well as packages for Fedora-15. Instructions on how to get and use Oz are available at http://aeolusproject.org/oz.html

If you have any questions or comments about Oz, please feel free to contact aeolus-devel@lists.fedorahosted.org or me (clalancette@gmail.com) directly.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release through bug reports, patches, and suggestions for improvement.

Git bash prompts and tab completion

Someone recently asked me about my nifty bash command-prompt with git branch names. If I'm not in a git directory, then the bash prompt looks normal:

[clalance@localhost ~]$ 

However, as soon as I cd into any directory that is a git repository, my prompt changes:

[clalance@localhost oz (master)]$ 

If I'm in the middle of a rebase, my prompt looks like:

[clalance@localhost oz (master|REBASE-i)]$ 

There are many other prompts, but that just gives you a taste of what you get. All of this goodness is due to the git-completion file that is shipped along with the git sources. The canonical place for git-completion.sh is actually the upstream git sources; you can see it here: http://repo.or.cz/w/git.git/blob/HEAD:/contrib/completion/git-completion.bash. Basically, you download that file, put it somewhere in your home directory (mine is at ~/.git-completion.sh), source it from your .bashrc, and then modify your PS1 to call the appropriate function. The end of my .bashrc looks like:

source ~/.git-completion.sh
export PS1='[\u@\h \W$(__git_ps1 " (%s)")]\$ '

The additional benefit that you get from sourcing .git-completion.sh is that you get branch auto-completion, which is also a very useful feature.

RPM dependency trees

Recently I wondered what the dependency tree for Aeolus looked like in Fedora. I knew we had a whole host of dependencies, but I thought it would be instructive to see it visually.

This has been mentioned in other blog posts in the past, but the basic procedure to do this on Fedora is:

# yum install rpmorphan graphviz
$ rpmdep -dot aeolus.dot aeolus-all
$ dot -Tsvg aeolus.dot -o aeolus.svg

The rpmorphan provides the rpmdep binary. The rpmdep binary is a perl script that runs through the RPM dependency information, outputting one digraph node per-line. Then we use dot (part of the graphviz package) to take that digraph information and generate an image out of it. In the above example I made it generate an SVG, but you can have it output PNG, JPEG, PDF, etc. The full list of what dot can do is here: http://www.graphviz.org/doc/info/output.html

Oz 0.7.0 release

I'm pleased to announce release 0.7.0 of Oz. Oz is a program for doing automated installation of guest operating systems with limited input from the user.

Release 0.7.0 is a bugfix and feature release for Oz. Some of the highlights between Oz 0.6.0 and 0.7.0 are:

• Ability to use the "direct initrd injection" method to install Fedora/RHEL guests. This is an internal implementation detail, but can significantly speed up installs for Fedora or RHEL guests. (thanks for the tip from Kashyap Chamarthy)


• Support for Fedora-16 (thanks to Steve Dake for help in making this work)


• Use the serial port to announce guest boot, rather than a network port. This makes it so we no longer have to manipulate iptables, and gets us one step closer to having Oz run as non-root


• (for developers) Re-written unittests in python for speedier execution


• (for developers) Additional methods in the TDL class to merge in external package lists (thanks to Ian McLeod)

A tarball of this release is available, as well as packages for Fedora-14, Fedora-15, and RHEL-6. Note that to install the RHEL-6 packages, you must be running RHEL-6.1 or later. Instructions on how to get and use Oz are available at http://aeolusproject.org/oz.html

If you have any questions or comments about Oz, please feel free to contact aeolus-devel@lists.fedorahosted.org or me (clalance@redhat.com) directly.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release through bug reports, patches, and suggestions for improvement.

New required kickstart line in Fedora 16

Just a quick note for anyone looking at Fedora-16. From Fedora-16 forward, you need a new line in your kickstart that looks like:

part biosboot --fstype=biosboot --size=1

I'm honestly not sure what this is exactly needed for, but unattended kickstart installs will not start without it. There is a bit more information at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/Kickstart