[clug] VMware ThinApps: anything like this in the FOSS/Linux world?

[Brad Hards]

On Saturday 30 April 2011 18:52:52 steve jenkin wrote:
> Can I create an image of a Virtual Machine and encapsulate it with the
> VM-runtime into a single binary/executable image??
Are you willing to assume a Linux (or perhaps Windows) host environment? 
If so, qemu + a guest OS, wrapped up with makeself might be able to do that.

It might not gain you much though. In particular, virtualisation usually 
protects the host from the guest, not the guest from the host.

If the guest environment is the same as the host environment, then I still 
think unpacking everything into a chroot under /tmp might be a possibility.

I'd guess the hard part is figuring out how to get an environment that is 
relatively small (i.e. has everything you need, but not things that you 
don't). A distro with good dependency tracking will help, but the right mix of 
static and dynamic linking could probably save quite a lot of space.

Brad