Oz 0.14.0 Release

All, I'm pleased to announce release 0.14.0 of Oz. Oz is a program for doing automated installation of guest operating systems with limited input from the user. Release 0.14.0 is a bugfix and feature release for Oz. Some of the highlights between Oz 0.13.0 and 0.14.0 are: Fix a bug in checksum checking (this should work again) Add a global lock around pool refresh; should get rid of a user-visible failure Support for Debian 8 Support for Ubuntu 15.04 Support for Fedora 22 Support for installing aarch64 guests Support for installing POWER guests Support for install arm 32-bit guests A tarball and zipfile of this release is available on the Github releases page: https://github.com/clalancette/oz/releases . Packages for Rawhide, Fedora-21, Fedora-22, EPEL-7, and EPEL-6 have been built in Koji and will eventually make their way to stable. 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 at 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 0.13.0 release

I'm pleased to announce release 0.13.0 of Oz. Oz is a program for doing automated installation of guest operating systems with limited input from the user. Release 0.13.0 is a bugfix and feature release for Oz. Some of the highlights between Oz 0.12.0 and 0.13.0 are:

• For Fedora, if the user specifies a version, but that isn't supported yet, try the last supported version (in this case), as that will often work.
• Fix a regression where we forgot to force the qcow2 image type
• Allow installs that use more than one installation device
• Add support for RHEL 6.5
• Rename OEL-6 to OL-6
• Add support for Ubuntu 14.04
• Add Windows 8.1 support
• Add CentOS-7 support
• Add the ability to specify kernel parameters in the TDL
• Make sure to remove dhcp leases from guests after the install
• Fix support for FreeBSD
• Add in support for TDL "precommands"; these are commands that are run *before* package installation
• Fix up file locking
• Add support for RHEL 5.11
• Remove Ubuntu ssh keys at the end of installation
• Add support for Ubuntu 14.10
• Add support for XInclude, for merging various TDLs together
• Add Fedora 21 support
• Add support for ppc64 and ppc64le

A tarball and zipfile of this release is available on the Github releases page: https://github.com/clalancette/oz/releases. Packages for Fedora-20, Fedora-21, Fedora-22, EPEL-6, and EPEL-7 have been built in Koji and will eventually make their way to stable. 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 at 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 0.12.0 release

I'm pleased to announce release 0.12.0 of Oz. Oz is a program for doing automated installation of guest operating systems with limited input from the user. Release 0.12.0 is a bugfix and feature release for Oz. Some of the highlights between Oz 0.11.0 and 0.12.0 are:

• Fixes to concurrent oz-install invocations
• Python 3 compatibility in the test suites
• Support for Ubuntu 12.04.3
• Support for Mageia
• Allow a MAC address to be passed in (instead of auto-generated)
• Support for RHEL5.10
• Support for Ubuntu 13.10
• Use lxml instead of libxml2 for XML document processing (it has much better error messages)
• Remove the unused "tunnels" functionality
• Support FreeBSD 10.0
• Remove deprecated functions from the Guest class
• Speed up guest customization on guests that support NetworkManager
• Follow subprocess commands as they are executed (makes debugging easier)
• Ensure that any paths from the user are absolute, otherwise things don't work properly
• Add support for OpenSUSE 13.1
• Add support for Fedora 20
• Add support for RHEL-7

A tarball and zipfile of this release is available on the Github releases page: https://github.com/clalancette/oz/releases. Packages for Fedora-19, Fedora-20, and EPEL-6 have been built in Koji and will eventually make their way to stable. 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 at 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 0.11.0 release

I'm pleased to announce release 0.11.0 of Oz. Oz is a program for doing automated installation of guest operating systems with limited input from the user. Release 0.11.0 is a bugfix and feature release for Oz. Some of the highlights between Oz 0.10.0 and 0.11.0 are:

• Add support for installing Ubuntu 13.04
• Add the ability to get user-specific ICICLE information
• Add the ability to generate ICICLE safely, by using a disk snapshot
• Add the ability to include extra files and directories on the installation ISO
• Add the ability to install to alternate file types, like qcow2, etc.
• Add support for installing Ubuntu 5.04/5.10
• Add support for installing Fedora 19
• Add support for installing Debian 7
• Add support for Windows 2012 and 8
• Add support for getting files over http for the commands/files section of the TDL
• Add support for setting a custom MAC address to guests during installation
• Add support for user specified disk and NIC model
• Add support for OpenSUSE 12.3
• Add support for URL based installs for Ubuntu

A tarball and zipfile of this release is available on the Github releases page: https://github.com/clalancette/oz/releases. Packages for Fedora-18 and Fedora-19 have been built in Koji and will eventually make their way to stable. 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 at gmail.com, or open up an issue on the github page: http://github.com/clalancette/oz/issues.

This was one of the most active Oz releases ever, because of the feedback and patches from the community. Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release through bug reports, patches, and suggestions for improvement.

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.

Exiting a Python program

You'd think this would be a straightforward topic, wouldn't you? In general it is simple, but there is a gotcha.

When you want to exit a program written in python, the typical way to do it is to call sys.exit(status) like so:

import sys

sys.exit(0)

For simple programs, this works great; as far as the python code is concerned, control leaves the interpreter right at the sys.exit method call. If you look under the hood, though, sys.exit is a little more interesting. It does not immediately call the libc function exit(), but instead raises a SystemExit[1] exception. If nothing catches the exception, then the python interpreter catches it at the end, does not print a stack trace, and then calls exit.

There are situations in which you do not want to raise an exception to exit the program. The example I recently came across was debugging some of my python code in Oz[2]. Oz is careful to clean up after itself, which means that on many exceptions it catches the exception, does some cleanup steps, and then re-raises the exception. In general this is a good thing to do, but sometimes when debugging I want to totally skip the cleanup steps so I can examine what went wrong.

Enter os._exit(). This function is a thin wrapper around the libc function exit(), so it does not raise an exception and leaves the program immediately. You would use it like:

import os

os._exit(1)

[1] http://docs.python.org/library/exceptions.html
[2] http://www.aeolusproject.org/oz.html