Use Cases

Here it is described different use cases for Kameleon. It should give you a better idea, through examples, of how Kameleon is useful for.

Distribute an environnement to your co-workers/students/friends/…

Whit Kameleon you can easily export your environment in any format. The export section of the recipe is made for this. For example, if you would like to export your image in VDI format to use VirtualBox you just have to set the export format wirh using the appliance_formats option either in your recipe or whit the CLI:

global:
  appliance_formats: vdi

And that’s it! Whatever the backend you choose kameleon default recipes are able to export it in any supported format: Allowed formats are: tar.gz, tar.bz2, tar.xz, tar.lzo, qcow, qcow2, qed, vdi, raw, vmdk

Make a Linux virtual machine with graphical support

You can directly use the templates that provide a desktop. However, here is an example of adding desktop capability to the debian8 template. First create a new recipe from this template:

kameleon new debian8-desktop default/from_image/debian8

Then edit the recipe file debian8-desktop.yaml and add gnome-core and xorg packages to the install list:

setup:
    # Install
    - software_install:
      - packages: >
          debian-keyring ntp zip unzip rsync sudo less vim bash-completion
          gnome-core xorg

These packages take some extra space, so add some space on the disk. 10G should be enough:

global:
    ...
    image_size: 10G

Build your recipe:

kameleon build debian8-desktop

When the build has finished, you can try you image with Qemu:

qemu-system-x86_64 -m 1024 --enable-kvm \
    builds/debian8-desktop/debian8-desktop.qcow2

Alternatively, you could use virt-manager that provide a good GUI to manage your virtual machines.

Note

If you want a better integration between the host and the guest like copy/paste use spice (http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/SPICE)

Create a fully reproducible experimental environement

To be sure that your image can be fully reproduce, you should use the Persistent Cache feature. It creates a cache compress tarball that contains everything that was downloaded during the build and allows to recreate your image from it directly using:

kameleon build --from-cache my_recipe-cache.tar.gz

You can even use the --offline mode to be sure that your recipe is built without accessing to the web.

To find a compete example refer to this repository that was made for a reproducible set of experiments: https://github.com/oar-team/batsim-env-recipes

Create a persistent live USB key

A dirty but reliable method to do this is to cat the entire raw disk on the USB key. First be sure that the disk size is equal or smaller then your Then, export you image in raw format (this is the disk content bit by bit) and dump it to your USB key. Once your image is built, if your USB key is the /dev/sdb device, be sure that it is not mounted and just do this:

cat my_image.raw > /dev/my_key

Warning

This is a dangerous operation, you usb key will erase without warning! Be sure that you pick the right device (use lsblk): it should be /dev/sdX where X is a letter. Do NOT use the dev/sdXY. unmount it and use the root device instead.