Semi-Official Fedora 18 downloadable cloud images

[Andy Grimm]

On Tue, Jan 15, 2013 at 12:26 PM, Matthew Miller
<mattdm at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> <http://mattdm.fedorapeople.org/cloud-images/>
>
> This is a basic Fedora 18 spin designed to work in OpenStack and other
> private cloud environments. It's configured with cloud-init so it will take
> advantage of ec2-compatible metadata services for provisioning ssh keys.
> That also currently creates an ec2-user account; we'll probably want to make
> that something generic by default in a future iteration. The root password
> is empty by default.
>
> These images were built using appliance-creator and the kickstart files from
>
>  http://git.fedorahosted.org/cgit/cloud-kickstarts.git/tree/generic
>
> They include the final F18 release plus all relevant zero-day updates.
>
> Note that unlike the standard F18 install, this image has /tmp on disk
> rather than in tmpfs, since memory is usually at a premium.
>
> The raw.xz files are compressed raw images; they consist of 10GB of mostly
> zeros and will need to be uncompressed to use. The .qcow2 images are also
> compressed but can be used immediately by anything which (like OpenStack
> Glance) can use that format natively.

Just a quick data point here:  I downloaded the raw.xz onto a CentOS 6
system, and ran unxz on it.  It seems the version of xz there does not
preserve the file's sparseness.  Fedora 17 and 18 have new enough xz
that they work fine, but I wonder if it would be worth encapsulating
the sparse file inside tar (i.e., make a tar.xz file) to work around
this for older systems.  I'm not sure how much people care, but it's a
simple change.

Andy