Oz version 0.1.0

I've just sent the following mail to aeolus-devel@lists.fedorahosted.org and cloud@lists.fedoraproject.org, announcing the first release of the Oz tool:

All,
I'm pleased to announce the first release of Oz, version 0.1.0. Oz is
a tool for doing automated installation of operating systems using the native
installation tools. While Oz is part of the Aeolus umbrella, and thus intended
to be used in a cloud management environment, it is also useful as a standalone
tool to do guest installation.

This first release focusses on providing the basic infrastructure to do guest
installs. There are 3 possible phases to a guest install (and all 3 are
optional):

1) Installation of a JEOS. Oz creates an automated installation file (a
kickstart, winnt.sif, preseed, etc), and then launches a KVM virtual machine
to do the installation. By default, a minimal JEOS is always installed to
reduce the likelihood of installation failure (though this behavior can be
overriden)

2) Customization. Once a guest is installed from step 1) (or otherwise
provided), the virtual machine is launched and a native tool is used to do
installation of additional packages and files. For instance, in the case of
modern linux, ssh is used to upload files and run commands to install
additional packages.

3) Manifest generation. After the guest installation and customization are
done (if any), a package manifest (and some other metadata) can be extracted
from the image.

As mentioned, all 3 steps above are optional; you can start at step 1 and run
all the way to step 3 using oz, or you can install a guest using another
method and skip directly to steps 2 or 3. Documentation of how to do these
sorts of things are on the Oz webpage at http://aeolusproject.org/oz.html.

At present, Oz can install the following types of guests:
Fedora: 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14
Fedora Core: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
RHEL 2.1: GOLD, U2, U3, U4, U5, U6
Fedora Core: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
RHEL 2.1: GOLD, U2, U3, U4, U5, U6
RHEL 3: GOLD, U1, U2, U3, U4, U5, U6, U7, U8, U9
RHEL 4: GOLD, U1, U2, U3, U4, U5, U6, U7, U8
RHEL 5: GOLD, U1, U2, U3, U4, U5, U6
RHEL 6: 0
Ubuntu: 6.10, 7.04, 7.10, 8.04.[1,2,3,4], 8.10, 9.04, 9.10
Windows: 2000, XP, 2003
RHL: 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 8, 9
OpenSUSE: 11.1, 11.2, 11.3

Note that not all guest types can do all 3 of the steps above. The Oz webpage
lists which backends can do which phases.

Instructions on how to download Oz are at
http://aeolusproject.org/oz-download.html

As usual, comments, questions, bug reports, and patches are welcome for Oz.