Example: Mount a Debian guest on the host using FUSE and libguestfs

Example — mount my Debian guest on my host Fedora server, using FUSE support which we added to libguestfs today:

$ mkdir /tmp/rich
$ guestmount $(virt-inspector –ro-fish /dev/vg_trick/Debian5×64) /tmp/rich
$ cat /tmp/rich/etc/debian_version
squeeze/sid
$ cat /tmp/rich/etc/hostname
debian5×64
$ ls -l /tmp/rich/etc/apt/
total 19
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 51 2009-05-14 18:07 apt.conf
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 1024 2009-08-13 18:10 apt.conf.d
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 1024 [...]

febootstrap now available in Debian

Nearly available anyway. It’s still being uploaded.
So now you can make Fedora filesystems, images, initramfs, appliances, virtual machines etc. on a Debian host.

libguestfs packages for Debian

… and packages for febootstrap are here.
I only bound the C API and guestfish so far, not all the language bindings.

libguestfs on Debian

libguestfs now compiles and passes most of the tests on Debian.

debian5×64:~/d/libguestfs$ LIBGUESTFS_QEMU=~/d/qemu/qemu.wrapper ./fish/guestfish

Welcome to guestfish, the libguestfs filesystem interactive shell for
editing virtual machine filesystems.

Type: ‘help’ for help with commands
‘quit’ to quit the shell

><fs> alloc /tmp/test 100M
><fs> run
><fs> sfdisk /dev/sda 0 0 0 ,
><fs> mkfs ext3 /dev/sda1
><fs>
debian5×64:~/d/libguestfs$ file /tmp/test
/tmp/test: [...]

febootstrap now runs on Debian

With a minor patch I got febootstrap running on Debian. What can you do with it? Install and boot mini Fedora appliances from a Debian host.
If you want to try it, note you will need to install the following Debian packages before compiling from source:

autoconf automake make fakechroot >= 2.9 fakeroot yum >= [...]

febootstrap: Fedora equivalent of debootstrap

As I mentioned before I was looking for a Fedora equivalent of Debian’s debootstrap. The alternatives aren’t really great, so I wrote one instead. Allow me to present febootstrap, a close copy of debootstrap.
One advantage of febootstrap is that it can build new Fedora instances without needing to be root. I use [...]

Fedora equivalent of debootstrap

Debian has a lovely command for quickly creating new Debian installs, debootstrap. In a single command line you can create an entire new chrooted Debian install.
Sadly Fedora lacks the simplicity of debootstrap, but there are relatively easy ways to get some of the functionality of debootstrap, which I will document here.
Firstly the suggested method [...]