Seems that last week I needed an openSUSE 11.1 VM to test out some chef scripts. Vagrant Cloud which is a great place to find Vagrant VMs didn’t have one, so I decided to create one.
Start first by downloading and installing packer an incredible tool for creating virtual machines from templates and scripts. I used the Opscode bento project as a starting point and created my own packer template for opensuse 11.1.
First I had to find a place where I could get the IOSs and a repository. Luckily there is still one available at: http://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/opensuse/discontinued/distribution/11.1/
After a couple of tries I figure out how to get the VM to boot from the IOS, enter the correct boot commands, provision the OS and run some setup scripts. The biggest problem was figuring out that I had to reboot the VM after upgrading the kernel, or the Virtual Box Guest Additions would not install. But packer can handle a reboot from a script, so it worked.
If you are interested the box can be used from Vagrant by doing:
vagrant init minesense/opensuse11.1
I’ve uploaded it to Vagrant Cloud at: https://vagrantcloud.com/minesense/opensuse11.1 and you can find and fork the source at: https://github.com/minesense/packer.