CentOS Stream Live ISO

Our Neighbors CentOS
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FR: Would be nice to have Live image with CentOS Stream similar to Fedora Workstation with preinstalled desktop environment.

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The AltImages SIG released last week some Gnome/KDE live images, for both x86_64 and aarch64.
Worth giving a try ? (haven’t tested these myself but saw them appearing)
@tdawson would be able to give more details around live images and eventually announce it :slight_smile:

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I was going to wait until the official announcement at CentOS Connect, but I’m fine with a little news leak.
Yes, we have released both a Gnome and KDE Live images for CentOS Stream 9. They are comparable to Fedoras Workstation (Gnome) and KDE Spin iso’s.
They can be found here.
https://mirror.stream.centos.org/SIGs/9-stream/altimages/images/live/

They will be updated regularly, at least quarterly. Possibly more often, but that is still to be determined.

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@tdawson and centos team, thanks for this opportunity! Should i report about Live version bugs in separate place or i could report them in regular centos bugtracker? I found some but first i want to reproduce them in non-live image and after that report.

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It’s not quite set up yet (because of the ongoing accounts system outage), but bug reports will go here: Overview - centos-sig-alt-images/spin-bugs - Pagure.io

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@tdawson
Troy, I’ve been searching for instructions on how to rebuild/remaster the CentOS Stream 9 live ISO image (https://mirror.stream.centos.org/SIGs/9-stream/altimages/images/live/x86_64/CentOS-Stream-Image-MIN-Live.x86_64-9-202407091002.iso), but haven’t found any. After modifying the boot/grub2/grub.cfg file on a writable copy of the ISO (needed to make a small change there), I attempted to rebuild the ISO multiple times using xorriso and genisoimage without success. I’m struggling to determine the correct parameters for these utilities. Could you provide some guidance?

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Don’t forget the command line:

dnf config-manager --set-enabled crb && dnf install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel{,-next}-release-latest-9.noarch.rpm

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This is a very good question. I didn’t realize the SIG didn’t have a good web page for it, and I’ve created an issue to get one made.

So you don’t have to wait, I’ll answer here, though it probably won’t be formatted as well.

We use Kiwi to create the Live images, and it works great locally. In fact, you don’t even have to have kiwi installed locally, it can all be done via podman and containers.

USER - Do this as a regular user
ROOT - Do this as root or sudo. We will assume you are root. It is best to do this in a different screen/console than the one you are using for USER. That way you don’t have to re-setup your container each time you attempt an image build.
CROOT - This is done as root in our container

First - make sure you can do a non-custom build.

  • USER mkdir /var/tmp/kiwi ; cd /var/tmp/kiwi
  • USER git clone https://pagure.io/centos-sig-alt-images/kiwi-descriptions.git
  • USER cd kiwi-descriptions ; git checkout c9s
  • ROOT cd /var/tmp/kiwi/kiwi-descriptions
  • ROOT podman pull quay.io/centos/centos:stream9
  • ROOT podman run --privileged --rm -it -v /dev:/dev -v $PWD:/code:z -w /code quay.io/centos/centos:stream9 /bin/bash
    You should now be in a CentOS Stream 9 container.
  • CROOT dnf -y install epel-release ; dnf -y install kiwi policycoreutils
  • CROOT kiwi-ng --type=iso --profile=XFCE-Live --color-output system build --description ./ --target-dir ./outdir
    If everything goes correctly, you should have an iso created in “outdir”. Since you have mounted the local directory when you started podman, that file should be /var/tmp/kiwi/kiwi-descriptions/outdir/CentOS-Stream-Image.x86_64-9.iso

The current list of profiles you can choose from is CINNAMON-Live, GNOME-Live, KDE-Live, MATE-Live, MAX-Live, MIN-Live, XFCE-Live.

After you’ve verified that you can build an image, now do some customizations. Edit whatever you want in the kiwi-descriptions folder (except for the outdir directory) and then run things again.

  • CROOT rm -rf ./outdir
  • CROOT kiwi-ng --type=iso --profile=XFCE-Live --color-output system build --description ./ --target-dir ./outdir

Since you wanted to edit the grub.cfg, I would suggest editing the file grub.cfg.iso-template

I hope this helps.