On Fri, 27 Apr 2018 07:19:42 +0100 Peter Robinson pbrobinson@gmail.com wrote:
I've become used to using kickstart files to automate my Fedora installs to VMs and bare-metal x86 hardware. I'm getting started with Fedora on ARM and am wondering if there is something similar to create custom disk images. The closest I've found is the page on creating ARM remixes: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/Creating_Remixes.
Is that still the way to go, or is there a better approach?
It depends a little, ARMv7 or aarch64? The mechanism will work for ARMv7, for aarch64 you'll need to use imagefactory.
I'm currently experiment with F28 pre-release on both ARMv7 and aarch64 on a Raspberry Pi 3. It's somewhat tedious to get the same set up on both sd cards. Part of the attraction of the RPi is the ease of swapping cards, and I want an easy path to set them up.
Thanks for the pointer to imagefactory. My searching had not found that before. I'll look into it. I also found the "Using Mock and --no-virt to Create Images" section of the livemedia-creator docs https://github.com/weldr/lorax/blob/master/docs/livemedia-creator.rst#using-mock-and---no-virt-to-create-images This looks very promising.
You can also run the install directly on the device as you can use u-boot to PXE boot and kick off an install using tftp like on x86, depending a little on the device some people will even put u-boot on a small SD card, eg an old 128Mb one from a phone, and then pxe/tftp install to another medium. With F-28 in theory (I'm not sure anyone has had a chance to test it) you can use uEFI/iPXE from u-boot to do a whole lot of other options too.
I'm not sure I want to set up a PXE boot environment just for a Pi, and network booting a Pi is an advanced skill. For x86, I copy the ISO to a USB drive and inject the kickstart, which is easy and low overhead for an infrequent job.
Jim