supermin - Tool for creating supermin appliances
by Richard W.M. Jones (rjones@redhat.com)
http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/supermin
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Supermin is a tool for building supermin appliances.  These are tiny
appliances [similar to virtual machines], usually around 100KB in
size, which get fully instantiated on-the-fly in a fraction of a
second when you need to boot one of them.

A complete description is in the supermin(1) man page.

IMPORTANT NOTE FOR USERS OF FEBOOTSTRAP 3.x:
  supermin 4.x is just an evolution of febootstrap 3.x (really we just
  renamed it). The previous febootstrap program is now called
  supermin. The previous febootstrap-supermin-helper program is now
  called supermin-helper. Apart from that they are identical, although
  they will evolve and add features over time.

IMPORTANT NOTE FOR USERS OF FEBOOTSTRAP 2.x:
  febootstrap 3.x is a complete rewrite.  febootstrap 2.x could only
  build Fedora distributions.  This version can build many varieties
  of Linux distros.  3.x only builds supermin appliances, it does not
  build chroots.  3.x does not build cross-distro, cross-release or
  cross-architecture systems.  If you want febootstrap 2.x, please use
  the 'febootstrap-2.x' branch from the git repository.

Requirements
------------

  ocaml

  ocaml findlib ("ocamlfind" program)

  perldoc
    - This is just used to generate the manpage.

  bash

  gcc

  gawk

  libcom_err
  libext2fs
  /sbin/mke2fs
    - These are part of e2fsprogs.

For Fedora/RHEL:

  rpm
  yum
  yumdownloader

For Debian/Ubuntu:

  dpkg
  aptitude

Optional
--------

  ocaml inifiles library (needed for zypper only)

These are only needed if you plan to boot the supermin appliances you
are building:

  qemu >= 0.13
  kernel >= 2.6.36

  zlib (statically linked) - if your kernel uses gzipped modules

  xz (statically linked) - if your kernel uses xz-compressed modules

Building and installing
-----------------------

  ./configure
  make
  sudo make install

Tests
-----

  make check

Note that the tests require a network connection.  If you don't
have a network connection (eg. for distro package building) then
try doing:

  ./configure --disable-network-tests

Examples
--------

See the examples/ subdirectory.

Feedback and bugs
-----------------

Send feedback to libguestfs@redhat.com.  You can file bugs in
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/ (under "Fedora", "supermin")