Producing small, reusable qemu debian and alpine images

The idea is to use debootstrap resp. apk.static to directly install debian or alpine on a target partition or volume.

See build-base-image.sh (Debian) and build-alpine-image.sh (Alpine).

Prerequisites

To build images:

apt install parted

To configure and run them:

apt install libvirt-daemon libvirt-daemon-system libvirt-clients avahi-utils
apt install racket

Add your username to the libvirt group.

Run host-setup.sh.

If you want to use personalcloud-images to hold active VM disk images, make sure it can be accessed and written to by libvirt-qemu group:

chown :libvirt-qemu personalcloud-images
chmod g+wx personalcloud-images

This includes x-bit access to the folders leading up to personalcloud-images!

On WSL2, make sure ping is allowed to do its job:

sudo setcap cap_net_raw+p `which ping`

Build a Debian image

Start the dpkg cache by

cd dpkg-cache; ./run-transient-docker-dpkg-cache.sh

In another window,

sudo ./build-base-image.sh

If things go wrong,

sudo ./clean-failed-build.sh

(In some cases you may need to clean out the loopback devices by hand with sudo losetup -d ....)

Build an Alpine image

Start the apk cache by

cd apk-cache; ./run-transient-docker-apk-cache.sh

In another window,

sudo ./build-alpine-image.sh

If things go wrong,

sudo ./clean-failed-build.sh

(In some cases you may need to clean out the loopback devices by hand with sudo losetup -d ....)