Tales of a blog renamer

Holy cow, KVM is fast! In addition to the steps on the Wiki, install virt-manager for a GUI (and manually connect to Localhost rather than using that little pre-populated localhost connection). Here's the builder command line I used:

• sudo ubuntu-vm-builder kvm karmic --arch 'i386'  --mem '512'  --rootsize '10000'  --swapsize '1024'  --kernel-flavour 'virtual'  --hostname 'karmic-virt'  --mirror 'http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu'  --components 'main,universe'  --name 'James Tatum'  --user 'jtatum'  --pass 'jtatum'  --libvirt qemu:///system  

This requires a bit of free space in /tmp to setup the chroot and do a debootstrap. Then, it creates the virtual disk in the current working directory. I can see why they don't recommend this for end users, as the tools are definitely rough around the edges but the speed is awesome. The best part about this setup is that it would be fairly easy to point the vm-builder to something like the current dev build of ubuntu and have it auto install something from a PPA or perform some other tasks to kick off some kind of automation. The whole thing is really automation friendly.