Appliance Operating System

The Appliance Operating System (AOS) is a minimal operating system definition, containing only the packages necessary to run an appliance. The AOS is meant to be a base, on which new appliance's can be built on top of and customized for a specific application. The AOS is described in a kickstart file and is hosted in the Fedora Spins KickstartPool, this definition is meant to evolve over time to become a smaller, more usable base appliance defination. The AOS is designed to work as a virtual machine or as a traditional locked down bare metal appliance.

The AOS can be consumed in three ways:
  1. Download a pre-built "binary blob" - download and run
  2. Build from a "recipe" - Build the appliance "on site" using the Appliance creator
  3. Running it on EC2 - Thincrust in the cloud!

Downloading the AOS

The AOS is currently available in Fedora 10 as a Fedora Spin, which is a pre-build "binary blob." The blob is packaged as a tarball, and includes a raw disk image and meta data required to run the appliance in a virtual container. The AOS image can be downloaded here http://spins.fedoraproject.org/

Once downloaded, you can launch the AOS as a virtual appliance on a Fedora using the following steps, It is recommended to be running F-10 however this should also work with F-9 or Rawhide.

  1. Install all prerequisite virt tools using yum: *note to use kvm you must be running a full virt box
    # yum install qemu kvm libvirt libvirt-python python-virtinst virt-manager virt-viewer
  2. Unpack the tarball containing the AOS:
    tar -xzvf F10-x86_64-AOS.tar.gz
  3. Use virt-imge to launch the image:
    virt-image F10-x86_64-AOS.xml
  4. Use "virsh list" to see if its running and get the IDNUM
    # virsh list
  5. Connect to appliance and log in to verify its running:
    # virt-viewer IDNUM


Building your Own

You can also build the AOS yourself using the Appliance Creator Tools and the kickstart file. The AOS is an official Fedora SPIN and the kickstart file is included in the spin-kickstarts package which can be installed via yum.

# yum install spin-kickstarts

See the tooling section for information on building appliances using this metadata and the Appliance Creator Tools.

Thincrust on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

We have uploaded several images which you can run within Amazon's EC2. The images are listed below: