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

autologin won't register a consolekit session, and gnomes
are too greedy regarding sessions to let us go unmolested...

This particular image isn't production ready when built on
current Sisyphus yet due to unresolved NM/dbus problems
but I decided to at least archive the reached state.

This one is contributed by Max Kosmach and somewhat
streamlined/tweaked by me; a part of it rather belongs to
nodm and xinitrc packages but is not exactly trivial to get it
there due to the looming systemd-logind/consolekit disaster;
see also #27449.

Several hacks to make NetworkManager usable in a LiveCD environment
are there too (but it resists so far).

The second shot at an image worked out;
MATE packages are not in Sisyphus yet, use

rpm http://autoimports.altlinux.org/pub/ALTLinux/autoimports/Sisyphus $ARCH autoimports
rpm http://autoimports.altlinux.org/pub/ALTLinux/autoimports/Sisyphus noarch autoimports

These tweaks were suggested by rom_as@
based on his continued m-p-d work.

distro/.live-desktop also changed to depend
on use/plymouth/live

(mike@: actually no sense to set both
KFLAVOURS and STAGE1_KFLAVOUR to the same value
since the latter is derived from the former)

Keyboard accelerators rather make sense
with menu/vesamenu UI.

Why would anyone try to remove apt when it's needed
for package dependency tracking for the installation,
it only takes a less cursory look at the build.log
to figure out it didn't actually happen anyways...

An initial draft of it was done half a year ago but several tricky
thingies had kept the code from showing up as it was rather brittle
and incomplete.

This implementation involves quite a few changes all over the place
but finally works good enough for live and installer images.

Please pay attention to the versions of these packages:
- installer-feature-setup-plymouth (0.3.2-alt1+)
- branding-altlinux-sisyphus (20110706-alt2+ if used)
- plymouth (0.8.3-alt20.git20110406+)

See also:
- http://www.altlinux.org/Branding
- http://www.altlinux.org/Plymouth

- minor bugfixes

The more or less basic desktop appeared to lack
base locale support (starting with glibc-locales).

It somehow managed to evade me that $(TMP) might be uninitialized;
definitely should be checked before stuffing into sed substitution
command.

NB: this could be done in pure make but my take was less readable.

Thanks shadowsbrother/gmail for hitting and reporting this.

legion@ implemented skipping depmod call, and that's several more
seconds for most of the images; let's shave these off if possible.

- docs updates

It might be spottable but not immediately obvious that a feature
lives entirely in features.in/FEATURE and every target it provides
is described in the corresponding config.mk; thanks dkr@ for asking.

It wasn't exactly obvious that the actual image build
isn't started with CHECK=1.

It appears that while splitting off main.mk we've lost
the ability to pass e.g. ARCHES via custom configuration;
thanks dkr@ for spotting this.

Whoops, forgot to feed placeholders for git to grok
the empty directories that are needed later...

It wasn't articulated clearly enough that features are strictly
incremental (while variables can be overridden).

lightdm-1.1+ handling had to be corrected
regarding the separate greeters.

virtualbox-addition modules need drm (see also #27344).

`make check' is a bit more convenient than relying on my head...

Shame on me, these shouldn't get forgotten in the first place.

- build helpers refactored
- initial frontend support

udisks seem to pass up META_VOL_ID;
let's make it a bit more informative.

nouveau just didn't work out on a GF7100 at hand
(while nvidia did fine) as well as on a MX440.

Need more real hardware testing though.

Just like livecd-install, graphical installer KMS support
looks better as an optional part of install2 feature.

Of course it's optional only if the release manager is fine
with VESA drivers and not KMS-requiring intel/radeon/nouveau;
thanks led@ for a confirmation just in case.

After having added metadata dependency livecd-install
started to look more like a feature than like an intermediate
distribution target; so things were shuffled a bit that way.

This further refines the modular build by making
metadata being a clearly separated feature rather
than having to rely on runtime tests, and also by
moving the code which cares for kernel bits of base
installation (.base list) in a feature of its own.

There's more to it but let's get the ball rolling first.

- branding feature

The initial work covered live images but missed an installer bit
(thus notes and slideshow were missing in install2) while forgetting
to put branding packages into base list (thus kindly making these
available for *manual* installation sometime after, ouch).