Chris L. fire-ant

Running Ubuntu 16.04.1 armhf on Qemu

This is a writeup about how to install Ubuntu 16.04.1 Xenial Xerus for the 32-bit hard-float ARMv7 (armhf) architecture on a Qemu VM via Ubuntu netboot.

The setup will create a Ubuntu VM with LPAE extensions (generic-lpae) enabled. However, this writeup should also work for non-LPAE (generic) kernels.

The performance of the resulting VM is quite good, and it allows VMs with >1G ram (compared to 256M on versatilepb and 1G on versatile-a9/versatile-a15). It also supports virtio disks whereas versatile-a9/versatile-a15 only support SD cards via the -sd argument.

Get netboot files

Ansible vault example

New in Ansible 1.5, “Vault” is a feature of ansible that allows keeping sensitive data such as passwords or keys in encrypted files, rather than as plaintext in your playbooks or roles. These vault files can then be distributed or placed in source control. To enable this feature, a command line tool, ansible-vault is used to edit files, and a command line flag –ask-vault-pass or –vault-password-file is used. Alternately, you may specify the location of a password file or command Ansible to always prompt for the password in your ansible.cfg file. These options require no command line flag usage.

Requirements

ansible > 1.5
openssl
inventory file
host_vars or group_vars
ansible directory best practices structure

	{
	"global": {
	"check_for_updates_on_startup": true,
	"show_in_menu_bar": true
	},
	"profiles": [
	{
	"devices": [
	{
	"disable_built_in_keyboard_if_exists": false,

	#cloud-config
	package_upgrade: true

	ssh_authorized_keys:
	- <your key>

	packages:
	- apt-transport-https
	- ca-certificates
	- curl