[Fedora-livecd-list] Live CD vs virtual appliance

[Jeremy Katz]

On Fri, 2007-09-14 at 17:29 -0400, Patrice Guay wrote:
> VMware has developed tools to create Linux-based virtual appliances. 
> They use a stripped down version of Ubuntu as the base OS. From what I 
> saw, livecd-tools offers a simpler and more powerful approach to create 
> an OS + application bundle. The virtual appliance creation involves 
> several steps and configuration files. Using livecd-creator, only one 
> configuration file is involved and only one command line is required to 
> create the iso image.

There are patches floating around on the list from Mark McLoughlin to
add support for generating more than just ISO images.  I've mostly held
off on applying them because they raise some interesting (to me at
least) questions about code duplication and how to manage some of the
code sharing that really needs to happen between livecd-creator and
anaconda.  That said, I think that after Fedora 8, it's going to be time
to tackle those issues a bit more.  

> The only advantage of virtual appliances is persistence. If this could 
> be solved for livecd-tools, I foresee an increased interest from those 
> planning to create virtual appliances for the livecd-tools project.

Well, the way that you solve persistence for appliances is (I think)
just to to make it a non-issue.  ie, don't use an iso + squashfs,
instead maybe just have a qcow image with the ext3 filesystem on it.  

As above, the code isn't hard... just a question of what to do around a
few abstractions

Jeremy