Help needed for Debian and Ubuntu

If you read any of my previous blog entries, you must be now familiar with this 'express installation' concept we have in Boxes. Its pretty neat actually, you just set a few options at the beginning and then you can leave Boxes (or your machine) and when you are back, everything is setup for you automatically in a new box.

I have invested a lot of time/efforts on this already and will be spending a lot more time in future as well but I am just one man so can not possibly cover all operating systems out there. That is why I am asking for help from anyone who will be interested in adding express installation support for Ubuntu and Debian while I focus on Fedora and Windows variants. Oh and if you are interested in adding support for some other distribution/OS, that contribution will also be more than welcomed.

In any case, happy hacking!

Comments

Jeremy Bicha said…
The Debian/Ubuntu package requires libosinfo to be packaged first. Once that happens, I expect we should be able to get Boxes packaged soon after, which will make it easier for people to get Boxes running instead of compiling from source. I did a bit of work on the Debian GNOME team getting the packaging started for Boxes as I'm curious to at least try it out.

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=649780

But then again, I don't think any distro has packages for Boxes yet; Fedora doesn't at least.
December 22, 2011 at 7:44 PM
zeenix said…
Thanks Jeremy for your efforts on getting Boxes to Debian. Very much appreciated, really but just to be clear my blog entry is about getting Debian into Boxes and not the other way around. Both are important of course but I was sure that some awesome Debian people will package it for debian/ubuntu soon enough (and seems I was correct) but I wasn't sure if anyone would take this other very important task.
December 23, 2011 at 5:28 AM
Anonymous said…
Debian is the mother of all OSes. It should not be put in a box like a toy OS.
December 23, 2011 at 8:32 AM
Anonymous said…
The Debian installer ("d-i") supports pre-seeding to pre-provide the answers for Debconf questions - this is probably how you'd want to drive it from Boxes. It's how win32-installer (a tool to install Debian starting from Windows) works, for instance.

I believe Ubuntu's installer is still based on d-i, so the same methods should work there.
December 24, 2011 at 9:23 AM
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