This script shows how you might generate a whole virtual machine, or a disk image for a virtual machine, starting with a tarball that contains the content for the machine.
The usage is:
tar2vm.sh input.tar.gz output.img 100M
where (for example) 100M
is the size of the output
disk image. You have to specify a size that is large enough to contain all
the contents of the tarball, but not too large that there is too much
wasted space (unless you want to give the VM extra working space of
course).
See also virt-make-fs.