VNUML ebuilds

What & why is this?

VNUML (Virtual Network User Mode Linux) is a tool that makes it easy to set up virtual networks between several instances of User Mode Linux.

To date, there is no official ebuild available for installing VNUML on gentoo linux, so I went looking for an inofficial one and found Jacques Landru's (tarball), which he uses for building a gentoo live cd.
I added some code to the ebuild and tried to make it particularly easy to use.

Where can I get it and how can I use it?

Quick guide (you should be root for all steps but the first):

• Download this tarball (mirror)
• Open /etc/make.conf and check that the variable PORTDIR_OVERLAY is set. If this is not the case, set it to /usr/local/portage. (If it is set, but to a different value, you'll have to unpack the tarball and move the files manually in the next step)
• Run tar -xvjf vnuml-portage-overlay-1.6.4-1.tar.bz2 -C /
• Run emerge vnuml

This should take care of everything and install VNUML for you, including a UML kernel and a root-filesystem. Mind you, downloading and unpacking the filesystem is done automatically, but it might take a while, so be patient ;-).

Details: VNUML depends on several programs which have to be installed in advance - the ebuild should take care of this. It also depends on several Perl modules, not all of which are available in portage, so I wrote the necessary ebuilds and added them to the tarball.
Furthermore, I wanted to make the installation as easy as possible, so I wrote separate ebuilds for the UML kernel and the root-filesystem which are available on the VNUML download site. This gives you the ability to update either of these separately (and easily, if you have a newer ebuild).
If you don't turn on any USE flags when emerging VNUML, both the UML kernel and the root-filesystem will automatically be installed, too. If you wish to use your own UML kernel or your own root-filesystem, set the USE flags custom-kernel or custom-rootfs, respectively.
E.g., installing only VNUML can be done by calling USE="custom-kernel custom-rootfs" emerge vnuml. If you use your own kernel or root-filesystem, take care to place them (or symlinks to them) in /usr/local/share/vnuml/kernels/linux and /usr/local/share/vnuml/filesystems/root_fs_tutorial (emerge should also remind you of this).
Since VNUML is written entirely in Perl, installing it on a platform other than x86 should be no problem, but I have no means of trying this out, so the ebuild uses KEYWORDS="~x86" for now.

Which versions are the ebuilds for?

The tarball includes ebuilds for VNUML 1.6.4-1, UML kernel 2.6.12.3-bs9-xt-3m and root-filesystem 0.3.3.

Final disclaimer

If you install and use the ebuilds, you do so on your own risk!
AFAIK, there are no severe bugs in the ebuilds, but if you manage to break your system by using them, it's not my fault!
If you want to improve any of the ebuilds, please do so - I left many comments explaining what the code does, so it shouldn't be too difficult to understand. If you have found a bug, or better yet, a bugfix, please drop me a mail @ tulkas@uni-koblenz.de