Custom live iso F44?

Ask Fedora
1

What is the current process to build a Fedora 44 Live ISO (with a view to customising)?

All I can find related to F44 is Making sure you're not a bot! I’ve tried the kiwi build script mentioned in the readme to build iso variants of multiple profiles, yet in each case booting ends up in a loop of

Starting dbus-broker.service
Started dbus-broker.service
Starting dbus-broker.service

and never progresses beyond that.

Is this how the official live iso was built? As I have no issue booting that.

Is there any other steps than those mentioned in the readme?

2

Another option you could consider is creating a kickstart file to control the installation. It’s a script that allows you to customize just about everything in the install process.

3

I used kickstart with F43, but I thought that was no longer supported from F44 onwards? At least I don’t see any Cosmic/KDE kickstarts available for the F44 images to use as the base?

4

That’s because the Fedora build folks don’t use kickstart to build their images any more. However, that doesn’t mean that kickstarts are deprecated or not usable. You can snag the older kickstart files from the Fedora Kickstart Files Repository.

They can be used to create an appropriate kickstart for your needs, but will definitely require customization.

HTHAL

5

Yes I was hoping to avoid that by using the same base file as was used for the Fedora 44 Live ISO and customise from that (as I did with Kickstart files with F43). However, the kiwi files do not seem to produce a bootable image for me.

I don’t know if the readme is lacking some information or if the Fedora team have used different files to build their Live iso, but following the readme produces an iso that does not completely finish booting.

I’d prefer not to have to figure out how to customise an F43 based kickstart to replicate the F44 live image if I can help it, although it’s looking like that may have to be the way to go.

6

While not live images, I’ve been “porting” kickstarts for Workstation, KDE, XFCE, MATE, i3, a No-gui minimal system, LAMP and others since Fedora 32 – and not using the build teams kickstart files.
My experience has been that going from one version of Fedora to the next (e.g., f43 to f44), minimal changes are required for the kickstart file – mostly the version and installation repo location and, if you’re using pxe boot, the boot files and kernel, as well as pointing at the repository for the new version.

Some changes might be required in the packages included, depending on changes you wish to make to the distribution. That said, I usually only need to modify the following lines to move to the next version:

url --url=“http://kickstarter.domain.com/FedoraCore44”

rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-44-x86_64

rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-rpmfusion-free-fedora-44

rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-rpmfusion-nonfree-fedora-44

Where I only need to increment the version. I’d note that the URL and keys above are customized for my private build environment, but I’m sure an appropriate URL can be found via the Mirror Manager site.

Out of curiosity, what changes do you think you’d need to make other than point your kickstart file at the appropriate version? Even if there are some unexpected changes (deprecated or replaced packages), that will require (usually minor) debugging.

Also, if you’re not customizing the live images, why build your own at all?

7

I plan to customise the images eventually, I just wanted to start with the unchanged live iso to make sure everything works before I start changing. Which, it didn’t :frowning:

I’ll take a look at migrating my F43 kickstart over to F44 although I’d still like to get to the bottom of why the kiwi iso gets stuck in a loop during booting, but I guess that can wait.

Thanks for the info btw.

8

Sounds like you have a plan. If you can’t get the kiwi builds working, here’s some Kickstart documentation that’s often helpful:

9

Have you checked out Fedora Remix and the Creating and Using a Live Installation Image section of the Fedora docs?

10

Adam’s recent response here might be relevant to this discussion. Maybe there is some hope that the documentation will be updated soon.

11

Both of those are, unfortunately, heavily outdated. They are both two tools out of date - they cover livecd-creator, which was the thing we used before livemedia-creator, which was the thing we used before kiwi.

livecd-creator still exists and may possibly be persuaded to produce cromulent Fedora images, but it’s not the way we build the real ones any more.

The best ‘doc’ ATM is probably the “Image build quickstart” bit of the fedora-kiwi-descriptions README.

12

:cookie:

(Just checking if sending a cookie works here too)

{ I love pressing the F5 key. It’s refreshing. }

14

The document you link is the one I followed. Building isn’t really the issue, it’s simple enough based on the readme. The issue is, despite following that document, the ISO fails to boot. It gets so far in starting various services then loops with the messages in the first post.

As the official Live ISO boots without issue (be it cosmic, kde, …) are there other steps the packaging team are taking to build the Live ISO that might explain this? I’m building on F44/Cosmic and have made no modifications to the kiwi scripts yet.

15

Not really, no…here is the Workstation live build task from the most recent Rawhide compose, for e.g. The command run was:

INFO backend.py:391:  Running in chroot: ['kiwi-ng', '--profile', 'Workstation-Live', '--kiwi-file', 'Fedora.x86_64.kiwi', '--debug', '--logfile', '/tmp/image-root.x86_64.log', 'system', 'build', '--description', 'fedora-kiwi-descriptions/', '--target-dir', '/builddir/result/image', '--set-type-attr', 'volid=Fedora-WS-Live-rawh', '--set-type-attr', 'application_id=Fedora-Workstation-Live-Rawhide']
DEBUG util.py:636:  child environment: None

You can find the Fedora.x86_64.kiwi file in the task - IIRC it’s just flattened from fedora-kiwi-descriptions , with the repos adjusted to be tied to the specific compose.

16

I called time on trying to figure out why Kiwi wouldn’t work. In case anyone wants to recreate/investigate this further, a vanilla F44/Cosmic spin install, used the two lines in readme for install and kiwi build the F44 iso (whether workstation, kde or cosmic) then booted in qemu (or actual usb stick) is enough to cause the issue.

Took your advice though on looking at kickstart again. With the F43 branch from the official kickstart files, it was very minor changes to make it build against F44 repos as mock already includes F44 configs. Only real change was removal of some package groups and changing f43 to f44 in the repos I added. Good enough base for customising.

I’ll give Kiwi another go some time in the future, but I don’t want to spend any further time looking into it just now.

Thanks everyone for the assistance.