Bug 448634

Created attachment 306857 [details]
Patch to add support for scientific linux guests

Just so you know, this patch works for Scientific Linux 5.
It works much better than the patch that was originally in SL 5.0 and 5.1.

Thanks! I've committed a variant of this upstream:

http://hg.et.redhat.com/virt/applications/virtinst--devel?cs=0784ae04ac12

If you want the patch submitter wants to send me a full name I'll add you to the
authors list. Also I'll make sure this is pulled in for 5.3

(In reply to comment #3)
> Thanks! I've committed a variant of this upstream:
> 
> http://hg.et.redhat.com/virt/applications/virtinst--devel?cs=0784ae04ac12
> 
> If you want the patch submitter wants to send me a full name I'll add you to the
> authors list. Also I'll make sure this is pulled in for 5.3

Feel free to list me as Michael "wart" Thomas

Thanks, and I look forward to this in RHEL 5.3.

This request was evaluated by Red Hat Product Management for inclusion in a Red
Hat Enterprise Linux maintenance release.  Product Management has requested
further review of this request by Red Hat Engineering, for potential
inclusion in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Update release for currently deployed
products.  This request is not yet committed for inclusion in an Update
release.

I'm really not sure that Scientific Linux really needs an explicit entry in
virt-manager.  It is a distro derived from RHEL and as such the exact same
settings used for the RHEL option should work just fine. For that matter we
should arguably kill the CentOS option in the menu too. 

The entire distro detection scheme needs to be overhauled anyways. Since we have
the ability to test for file existence without grabbing, we can sidestep the
whitelist activity and just directly touch the xen boot kernel or pxeboot
kernel, or in the case of say SLES whatever crazy files we need to hack together
for a boot kernel.

The distro stuff is for more than just where to grab files - it also controls
what hardware devices are configured by default. eg USB graphics tablet, UTC vs
localtime for clock, and  IDE vs VirtIO for disk config, so we can't avoid it -
these are the kind of features that are identical across all derived distros

Right, I misread your comment a bit. I was refering to the whole
detect-a-distro-from-an-install-tree action. I actually didn't add scientific
linux as an entry in the big os list, and I agree we should condense down centos
as well to just fall use rhel.

Speaking of the big OS list though, I wouldn't mind trying to slim that down a
bit. We are looking at a situation in a couple years where we'll have entries
for fedora 5-14 among other things.

From a qa perspective, to test this, use the command:

virt-install --name sltest -r 256 --nodisks --paravirt --nographics --location
http://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/46/x86_64

Prior to the patch this should fail with 'Installable distribution not found'.
After the patch this command should succeed.

Okay, fix is in python-virtinst-0.300.2-9.el5. Setting to MODIFIED.

An advisory has been issued which should help the problem
described in this bug report. This report is therefore being
closed with a resolution of ERRATA. For more information
on therefore solution and/or where to find the updated files,
please follow the link below. You may reopen this bug report
if the solution does not work for you.

http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2009-0216.html

python-virtinst-0.300.2-12.el5, which comes with RHEL 5 Update 3, works for 90% of Scientific Linux versions.  But it doesn't work with their "sites", or derivatives.  It almost works though.   The problem is that for DistroManager.py, you check for SL.releasenote, which should work in all cases.  But in OSDistro.py you check for just the directory SL, which fails for "sites".
I am including a patch which checks for SL.releasenote in both OSDistro.py and DistroManager.py.    We are also checking for "Scientific Linux" in .treeinfo, like you are doing in other releases, but not for Scientific Linux.

Created attachment 331061 [details]
python-virtinst-0.300.2-12.el5 to allow SL sites as guests

Could you provide an example of a failing URL?

http://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/52/i386/sites/Fermi/