Hi fedora-devel,
This morning I set out to set up a VM for web development for a project I've been
working on so I could access my development environment from multiple locations /
workstations without having to set it up again and again on different systems.
I had a surprisingly difficult time in doing this. The steps I followed, wanting to
interact with the VM via virt-manager [1]:
- Look at Atomic website page, find link for cloud images, try image advertised as
libvirt (was a box image), try to import into virt-manager, fail
(not a bootable image)
- Realize that was a dumb move and try again with raw image. Tried to import into
virt-manager, didn't know I have to decompress manually first. Fail. (not a bootable
image)
- Give up on Fedora base cloud image, try server. 3GB download, takes 30 min to install.
Install concludes with somehow either crashing the hypervisor or disconnecting
virt-manager from the hypervisor.
- Realize how heavyweight server seems and it's not going to be good for something I
really wanted to be lean and clean, esp when seeing stuff like snappy scroll by in the
package install list (nothing against snappy, just not smtg I'd expect in a lean
webdev env)
- Get help in an irc development channel, learn I have to extract the raw image, hurrah,
quick results except! Boot stalls.
- Found out it's cloud-info stalling the boot.
- Yay I have a login prompt! What's the login info? Gahhhh...
- Realize have to run virt-customize --uninstall cloud-init --root-password
password:whatever --selinux-relabel -a theimage
- Success finally (ETA 1.5 hrs not 100% fully attended of course)
Note that:
- I searched the Fedora docs, website, ask Fedora, and did general searches at each point
of failure and didn't find much in the way of guidance. Only in talking to a couple of
knowledegable and helpful folks in real time was I able to get past the fail points.
- Something else to note that's non obvious is setting up virt manager as non-root,
first answer
https://ask.fedoraproject.org/en/question/45805/how-to-use-virt-manager-a...
OK so my questions for you, Fedora development community:
- Is running a lightweight local VM for web development a usecase we want to support? Is
it dare I ask important?
- If so, is what I ended up setting up what we want people in that usecase to do? (E.g.
use Fedora cloud base image, set up in virt-manager or boxes, using virt-customize to
remove cloud-init and configure login password?
I suppose my instinct in your case would be just to do a conventional
minimal install, either using the Everything netinst image or the
Server DVD or netinst image. But I agree that we don't really do a good
job of telling people our recommended approach for this kind of use
case, or flagging up that the Cloud images are not it, unless you're
doing something very specific.
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net