Less than a year ago, I introduced TestDrive, a convenient way of incrementally syncing ISOs from ubuntu.com, and running them in KVM, VirtualBox, or Parallels. It's a great way to do your ISO-testing, or just keep up with the Ubuntu release under development. I created the project for a couple of reasons:
- To make it even easier to run Ubuntu in a virtual machine
- To show off KVM (without the overhead of libvirt or virt-manager)
- To make the daily development releases of Ubuntu safely usable by non-technical Ubuntu enthusiasts (who inevitably show up the week before release saying that they just tried the Beta or RC for the first time, and "by golly -- stop the release -- it's not ready!!!"
Well, TestDrive has come a long way -- mostly thanks to Andres Rodriguez, my Google Summer of Code student who has put a nifty GTK front end on TestDrive!
If you haven't tried the TestDrive GUI yet, please check it out. You should be able to install it directly from Maverick, or using the backported packages for Lucid from the PPA. With one command (or, now, one graphical button click), you can have any Ubuntu ISO up and running in a virtual machine!
Please let us know what you think! You can leave opinions here in the blog comments, but please file bugs against the project in Launchpad.
Also, I'd like to add a "file handler" in Gnome, such that you can right-click on an ISO, and select "Open with TestDrive". Can anyone tell me how to do this?
Cheers!
:-Dustin
As far as I remember, to add an association you just need to add "MimeType=the/mimetype" to your desktop entry. When dpkg installs your package and updates the desktop cache, your system will become aware of the association and allow you to open files as you specified.
ReplyDeleteIf the ISO mimetype is not registered (ie, it's application/octet-stream) in Ubuntu, things might get a little more tricky.