See http://www.opennet.ru/openforum/vsluhforumID3/86239.html#1
for a query that has led to this one; in particular,
- xdm dropped (won't log in root and there are no users yet);
- network is brought up and configured via DHCP by default;
- apt-get works out-of-box;
- default image size is twice the chroot size.

Finally tired of expr(1) quirks,
and even ash(1) does $((arithmetic-expansion))!

Yes, mkimage-profiles is now able to build VM disk images.
So far the support is pretty basic:

- a single hard drive image with a single partition/FS
- only stock root password is configurable
- LILO is hardwired as a bootloader

The resulting images tend to boot under qemu/kvm though.

Please see doc/vm.txt for the warning regarding additional
privileges and setup required.  This was started back in
February but I still hoped to avoid sudo/privileged helper
(and libguestfs is almost as undistributable as can be)...

Thanks:

- http://blog.quinthar.com/2008/07/building-1gb-bootable-qemu-image-using.html
- Alexey Morarash who reworked that as https://github.com/tuxofil/linsygen
- led@, legion@, vitty@, aen@ for providing advice and inspiration