Creating a Mir Snap in the cloud

I tend to do all my work in the cloud (and work physically from a useful but comparatively powerless chromebook running Ubuntu). So creating a Mir Snap on my local machine wasn’t an option I was keen to try.

Mainly for my own documentation, the first attempt at creating a Mir snap (a display server for experimenting with Kodi on Ubuntu Snappy), went like this:

First spin up an Ubuntu Wily development instance in a(ny) openstack cloud (I’m using a Canonical internal one):

$ nova boot --flavor cpu2-ram4-disk100-ephemeral20 --image 1461273c-af73-4839-9f64-3df00446322a --key-name ******** wily_dev


Less than a minute later, ssh in and use the existing snappy packaging branch for mir:


$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:snappy-dev/tools
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade
$ sudo apt-get install snappy-tools bzr cmake gcc-multilib ubuntu-snappy-cli mir-demos mir-graphics-drivers-desktop dpkg-dev

$ bzr branch lp:~mir-team/mir/snappy-packaging && cd snappy-packaging && make


The last step uses deb2snap to create the snap package from the installed deb packages. So, the (76M) snap is for the amd64 architecture – as the instance I created is amd64:


$ ls -lh mir_snap1_amd64.snap
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ubuntu ubuntu 76M Jun 21 11:20 mir_snap1_amd64.snap


Next up… using either QEMU or an ARM cloud instance (I’m not sure that the latter is available) to create an ARM Mir snap for my Raspberry Pi, and testing it out…