[Users] Updated contributed precreated OS Templates

[Scott Dowdle]

Greetings,

Just wanted to mention that update my contributed precreated OS Templates for:

CentOS 4, 5 i386/x86_64

centos-4-i386-default-4.7-20090117.tar.gz   17-Jan-2009 15:35  115M
centos-4-i386-minimal-4.7-20090117.tar.gz   17-Jan-2009 15:37   95M 
centos-4-x86_64-default-4.7-20090117.tar.gz 17-Jan-2009 15:40  122M
centos-4-x86_64-minimal-4.7-20090117.tar.gz 17-Jan-2009 15:42  100M
centos-5-i386-default-5.2-20090117.tar.gz   17-Jan-2009 15:45  125M
centos-5-i386-minimal-5.2-20090117.tar.gz   17-Jan-2009 15:48  102M
centos-5-x86_64-default-5.2-20090117.tar.gz 17-Jan-2009 15:51  130M
centos-5-x86_64-minimal-5.2-20090117.tar.gz 17-Jan-2009 15:53  113M

Fedora 9, 10 i386/x86_64

fedora-9-i386-default-20090203.tar.gz       03-Feb-2009 13:54  140M 
fedora-9-i386-minimal-20090203.tar.gz       03-Feb-2009 13:57  118M
fedora-9-x86_64-default-20090203.tar.gz     03-Feb-2009 14:02  147M
fedora-9-x86_64-minimal-20090203.tar.gz     03-Feb-2009 14:06  137M
fedora-10-i386-default-20090203.tar.gz      03-Feb-2009 13:45  149M
fedora-10-x86_64-default-20090203.tar.gz    03-Feb-2009 13:50  170M

I re-based them all on them all on the newer "official" OS Templates that Kir posted last month.  The new official OS Templates have udev installed and work well no matter what additional software you install.  Older templates would often break if udev got installed.  That is no longer the case.

How do my contributed OS Templates differ from the "official" ones:

1) I removed all of the samba packages.  They are huge and use up a lot of disk space and the vast majority of users won't use them.  If they are wanted, they can easily be installed

2) httpd's config has been altered from the "official" template to be more like the distro's default httpd.conf.  The "official" OS template only starts up 1 httpd process.

3) I turned off some services by default that I thought most users wouldn't use.  They can easily be added.  They include xinetd, saslauthd and that's about it.

4) They are updated as of the date they were created

5) The x86_64 have had all i386/i686 packages removed... which provides quite a bit of space savings.

6) I created minimal OS Templates just by removing all packages it'd let me remove without taking out everything.  I think in the future I'll discontinue the minimal OS Templates unless people say they want them.  It is easy enough to remove unwanted software from the default OS Templates

7) There isn't an official Fedora 10 OS Template so I made a container from the Fedora 9 OS Templates and upgraded them.  This actually worked very well and I didn't run into any issues.

I will try and keep those OS Templates updated on a monthly basis.

Easy GUI Containers!
====================

Because of the way the new official OS Templates are built it is very easy not to create a GUI container.  What I mean by "GUI" is... it is no longer a chore to install all of the desktop environments/managers and GUI apps into the containers.  In the past, a few package manager tricks had to be done to keep udev from breaking the container but that is no longer the case.

As a test I created a Fedora 10 i386 container.  Then I did "yum grouplist > groups".  Then I edited the groups file to remove Virtualization, Input Methods, Fedora Packager, and Clustering.  Everything else I left in there... then I installed all of the groups.  It ended up bing about 1,450 packages and around 2GB worth of package downloads... but after it was all over I created a user, setup vncserver to start KDE... and then connected as the user with vncviewer.  I easily ran KDE 4.1.4, konsole, Firefox, OpenOffice.org Writer, OOo Calc, OOc Impress, GIMP, Inkscape, and Eclipse in about 850MB of RAM... although as more files are loaded, I'm sure the memory usage could creep right up there like a physical machine.

Anyway, creating GUI OS Templates is fairly easy with CentOS 4 and 5, and Fedora 9 and 10... for anyone who wants a desktop type container.

TYL,
-- 
Scott Dowdle
704 Church Street
Belgrade, MT 59714
(406)388-0827 [home]
(406)994-3931 [work]