I’m an admin on Fedora Forum, someone there asked an interesting question I have no solid answer for. There are “Lab” spins for Fedora seen here at Fedora Labs | The Fedora Project,
suppose someone installed a generic Fedora like “Workstation” but then wants to morph his install to be just like he had installed the Lab “Design Suite” or Lab “Neuro” spin.
I did this command on my Fedora install:
dnf group list --hidden | grep -iE 'design|neuro'
and found there were two groups matching those strings and which might capture the packages needed to implement those Lab spins
neuron-modelling-simulators Neuron Modelling Simulators
design-suite Design Suite
But the issue is, there are some Lab Spins like “Jam” that don’t have an obvious dnf group that captures all the packages to make that Lab Spin. I suspect “Jam” is “workstation” + an ad hoc list of multimedia packages OR it could be that “Jam” is just adding the plain old “multimedia” group and then the user has to pull in the third party rpmfusion packages as needed. I suspect that’s a “No” because the Jam “Featured Applications” list I see here: Fedora Jam Lab | The Fedora Project
contains some packages like “SooperLooper” which are not in “multimedia” group. So it seems that Jam has no single group I could have someone “dnf group install <groupname>” to get them upgraded to be “Jam”.
So is there a simple group procedure to convert a basic Fedora install like “Workstation” into any one of the “Lab” spin installs? My goal is to have some small list of dnf commands I can tell someone to run to go from “Workstation” to each of the Lab spins.
The totality of the differences between the releases is captured in the kickstart scripts used to generate them. So, for example, you can see that in the case of the Jam spin, threadirqs is added as an additional kernel parameter and the @audio package group is installed (among other things).
To add: the comps groups are not necessary for the creation of spins. We created the comps group for the simulation tools to make it easy for users to install them all on any Fedora variants, and since the group existed, we used it in the kickstart too.
So apparently the answer is no, there’s no basic dnf command to convert a baseline Workstation install into any of the Lab Spins. The guy I’m trying to find the answer for is a basic user and he’s not going to want to hack around with kickstart files and so on.
I suppose what I could do is just have him install each of the packages on the Lab Spin’s particular Featured Application list. I would think that would work.
For the most part, those kickstart files just contain lists of packages (or package groups) to install or remove (- means remove). On the whole there is very little scripting in them and what scripting there is doesn’t tend to be anything super important. I wouldn’t consider comparing and contrasting those files to be too difficult of a task. But maybe that is just me.
