Building ThinCrust with Appliance Creator

You can build the AOS or a custom appliances using the Appliance Creator Tools and a kickstart file. The "appliance-creator" is included in the appliance-tools package and builds pre-installed, multi-partitioned, disk images with grub installed on the first partition of the first disk similar to a real disk.

To build a thincrust appliance image using the appliance creator you will need to install the appliance-tools package and a couple general virt tools to run virtual appliances on your Fedora box. It is recommended to be running F-10 however this should also work with F-9 or Rawhide. You may also wish to install the spin-kickstarts rpm which includes example kickstart files, including the AOS.

  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. Install the latest versions of spin-kickstarts, which contains the AOS definition.
    # yum install spin-kickstarts
  3. Install the latest versions of appliance-tools,
    # yum install appliance-tools
  4. Build the appliance, with the example kickstart file provided.
    # appliance-creator -n thincrust --config /usr/share/spin-kickstarts/aos-{VERSION}.ks
  5. Launch the image using libvirt
    # virt-image thincrust.xml
  6. Use "virsh list" to see if its running and get the IDNUM
    # virsh list
  7. Connect to appliance and log in with root/thincrust and verify its running:
    # virt-viewer IDNUM

Building Thincrust From Source

To check out and build from source, the code is available here: here