Re: Bootable GNOME images available

[Tristan Van Berkom <tristan vanberkom codethink co uk>]

Hi Felipe,

On Thu, 2019-09-19 at 12:09 +0200, Felipe Borges wrote:
> Hi Tristan, thanks a lot for working on this. It is definitely going
> to help our development efforts both in CI and design.
>
> On Thu, Sep 19, 2019 at 11:39 AM Tristan Van Berkom via
> desktop-devel-list <desktop-devel-list gnome org> wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> >     It's my pleasure to announce that we are now producing bootable
> > images based on the very latest of GNOME modules as defined by the
> > gnome-build-meta[1] (which we also use to build the releases and
> > produce the GNOME flatpak runtime/sdk).
> >
> > At this time, the image is recreated every time the gitlab pipeline
> > runs, and can be downloaded from gitlab here[2].
>
> In GNOME Boxes we have the "Download an OS" feature that makes it
> easier to obtain and install an OS. I would love to feature the GNOME
> images there. For that, could we hotlink directly to [2]? Will this
> link change?
>
> https://fedoramagazine.org/download-os-gnome-boxes/

I can't say for certain that this will be a permanent link.

The images weigh in at about 3.5 GB as it stands, and I'm not entirely
sure how long they are stored on gitlab and if it makes sense to keep
accumulating them on gitlab.

Of course, this mostly requires that we conspire on deciding what the
best solution is long term.

> Also, could we include spice guest tools in the image? This way Boxes
> could provide cool features such as "shared clipboard, automatic
> resolution, shared folders, sent files via drag and drop, and many
> more. My initial run of the image in Boxes showed that this adjustment
> will be necessary if we want people to run the VMs in Boxes.

I think it would be fine to include spice guest tools yes, the kernel
already has some guest specific features enabled, this sounds like a
natural extension to that.

The gnome-build-meta project already includes spice-protocol and
spice-gtk in the 'elements/core-deps' subdirectory, whatever is missing
could be added there and included in the image.

FWIW, I did try to boot the image with Boxes but indeed had some issues
(I think I was mostly hoping to have out of the box host network
sharing "just work") - I think it would be really great if the image
"just works" with boxes.

> What is the best channel for us to discuss these things I mentioned above?

As it stands, the body of work is maintained by the release team and
also the freedesktop-sdk project (as GNOME uses the latter as a shared
base, of course some coordination is required). So for example, if you
need a kernel feature enabled then the patch should go to the
freedesktop-sdk project.

For IRC, I would recommend the #release-team channel on gnome irc, and
the #freedesktop-sdk channel on freenode.

For issue tracking:

    https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-build-meta/
    https://gitlab.com/freedesktop-sdk/freedesktop-sdk/

Thanks for your encouraging enthusiasm !

Cheers,
    -Tristan