Converting a virtual disk image: VDI or VMDK to an ISO you can distribute

Thats excellent Alon, thanks a million!  It wasn't easy was it?!  I'm snowed under right now but I'm really looking forward to trying this out once I'm back in "iso mode".

TKL just keeps on impressing me more all the time.

I'm in the midst of trying this and I just now slavishly followed the "GOTCHA 2" suggestion of replacing the VM-optimal kernel with a standard kernel.  However if the ISO is going to be used exclusively for VMs, would it make sense to skip this step?

Hi,

Thanks so much for such interesting articles!

I propose another tipical scenario:

- You install a GNU/linux OS at secondary (non bootable) partition on your windows box.

- After try and setup a lot of things you decide to move your Linux instalation to a virtual machine....

The question is:

¿How to convert your secondary nonbootable linux partition to a virtual machine bootable disk???

Cheers,

Paco

I had partial success with this -- I was able to create an ISO that worked perfectly as a "Live CD".  I was able to run my appliance directly off the ISO.  The configuration console magically included a new "Install to Disk" option.  However when I tried this it got pretty far into the installation -- including seemingly copying the rootfs to the disk -- but then failed while trying to set up grub.

But I'll leave that to another post -- I think even the creation of the "Live ISO" was a good start!

Heres another couple of "gotchas" I experienced:

(1) Alon mentioned that you may find you have multiple partitions on your source VMDK.  In fact its probable that you will -- I certainly did on the Turnkey/Postgres-based VM I started with.  However I was using another TKL-based VM as the "working machine" to run the commands on and I had trouble installing kpartx here.  I switched to a Fedora host and was able to install kpartx ("yum install kpartx" iirc) and complete the rest of the procedure here.

(2) When I chrooted to apply the generic kernel to the rootfs, I found that I had no DNS (so apt-get couldn't find repositories).  The same might happen to you depending on how your network is set up.  Assuming the machine you're working on has working DNS, doing the following before you chroot should fix this:

cp /etc/resolv.conf turnkey-core.rootfs/var/run

 (the desired destination of resolv.conf is likely different on a non-TKL-based rootfs).

Hope that helps!  Heres the script I'm running to get as far as the chroot (its more-or-less as per Alon's directions except I've hardcoded the name of the partition in the loop device):

#!/bin/bash

echo Setting up loop device...
losetup /dev/loop0 turnkey-core.raw 

echo Adding a partition device for each partition in the loop device...
kpartx -av /dev/loop0

echo Mounting the first partition \(ie the rootfs\)
mount /dev/mapper/loop0p1 turnkey-core.mount/

echo Copying the rootfs from the mounted partition to the new \(development\) copy of the rootfs
rm -fr turnkey-core.rootfs/
mkdir turnkey-core.rootfs/
rsync -a -t -r -S -I turnkey-core.mount/ turnkey-core.rootfs

echo Cleaning up the mounts and loopback device...
umount -d turnkey-core.mount/
kpartx -d /dev/loop0
losetup -d /dev/loop0

#echo Setting up name resolution on new rootfs \(need this during chroot\)
#cp /etc/resolv.conf turnkey-core.rootfs/var/run

Just throwing this out there.  I used it on a server to create an ISO with all of the goodies I put on there.  Never tried it on a virtual machine.  Will try soon though.