How To Create A Custom Fedora-7-Live-i386 CD?

[Ciba LO]

Hello, list users,

The current Fedora-7-Live-i386 CD comes with no firmwares
in /lib/firmware for some kernel wifi drivers, e.g. rt73usb and bcm43xx.
It would be nice to add these firmwares or needed modules in the
existing Fedora-7-Live-i386 iso image.

How to modify the existing Fedora-7-Live-i386 iso image to build such a
custom live cd that can run on any Linux-compatible pc without any
installation?  Thank you in advance.

[Jeremy Katz]

On Sun, 2007-11-18 at 18:53 +0800, Ciba LO wrote:
> The current Fedora-7-Live-i386 CD comes with no firmwares
> in /lib/firmware for some kernel wifi drivers, e.g. rt73usb and bcm43xx.
> It would be nice to add these firmwares or needed modules in the
> existing Fedora-7-Live-i386 iso image.
>
> How to modify the existing Fedora-7-Live-i386 iso image to build such a
> custom live cd that can run on any Linux-compatible pc without any
> installation?  Thank you in advance.

If you look at the README in the livecd-tools package, you'll see a
description of the baseon option (-b) to add things to an existing live
image.  Or alternately, you can just modify the configs used for the
Fedora 7 image and rebuild the entire image

But note that if you are wanting to include things which are not
included in Fedora (such as the bcm firmware) and then distribute the
result, you'll also need to remove the Fedora trademarks from the image

Jeremy

[Ciba LO]

Hello Jeremy,

Thank you very much for replying to my post.

I tried your suggestion using livecd-tools with base-on option
to add the rt73usb-firmware package.  First, I put the firmware
and the image under /home/repodata.

# cd /home/repodata/
# ls -la
total 716972
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root      4096 2007-11-21 15:01 .
drwxr-xr-x 23 root root      4096 2007-11-21 19:52 ..
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 733427712 2007-11-11 15:56 Fedora-7-Live-i686.iso
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root       156 2007-11-11 16:07 Fedora-7-Live-i686.iso.md5
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root       301 2007-11-11 16:05 Fedora-7-Live-i686.iso.sha
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root      5655 2007-09-27 01:40 rt73usb-firmware-1.8-4.noarch.rpm
#

After, adding rt73usb-firmware to and removing gnome-games from the existing iso image.  
I got the error messages displayed as follows.

# livecd-creator --repo=c6,file:///home/repodata \
>   --base-on=Fedora-7-Live-i686.iso \
>   --package=rt73usb-firmware \
>   --exclude-package=gnome-games \
>   --fslabel=My-Fedora-7-LiveCD

mount: block device /dev/loop1 is write-protected, mounting read-only
rpmdb: Program version 4.3 doesn't match environment version
error: db4 error(-30974) from dbenv->open: DB_VERSION_MISMATCH: Database environment version mismatch
error: cannot open Packages index using db3 -  (-30974)
error: cannot open Packages database in /var/tmp/livecd-creator-e2-aAs/install_root/var/lib/rpm
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/livecd-creator", line 1088, in <module>
    sys.exit(main())
  File "/usr/bin/livecd-creator", line 1067, in main
    target.setup(options.uncompressed_size, options.base_on)
  File "/usr/bin/livecd-creator", line 434, in setup
    self.build_dir + "/install_root")
  File "/usr/bin/livecd-creator", line 205, in setup
    root = installroot)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/yum/__init__.py", line 113, in doConfigSetup
    errorlevel=errorlevel)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/yum/__init__.py", line 159, in _getConfig
    self._conf = config.readMainConfig(startupconf)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/yum/config.py", line 613, in readMainConfig
    yumvars['releasever'] = _getsysver(startupconf.installroot, startupconf.distroverpkg)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/yum/config.py", line 680, in _getsysver
    idx = ts.dbMatch('provides', distroverpkg)
TypeError: rpmdb open failed
#

What am I missing?  Thank you in advance.

By the way, how to remove the Fedora trademarks from the image.

Best regards,
Ciba LO  [e-mail]

On Sun, 2007-11-18 at 18:53 +0800, Ciba LO wrote:
> The current Fedora-7-Live-i386 CD comes with no firmwares
> in /lib/firmware for some kernel wifi drivers, e.g. rt73usb and bcm43xx.
> It would be nice to add these firmwares or needed modules in the
> existing Fedora-7-Live-i386 iso image.
>
> How to modify the existing Fedora-7-Live-i386 iso image to build such a
> custom live cd that can run on any Linux-compatible pc without any
> installation?  Thank you in advance.

If you look at the README in the livecd-tools package, you'll see a
description of the baseon option (-b) to add things to an existing live
image.  Or alternately, you can just modify the configs used for the
Fedora 7 image and rebuild the entire image

But note that if you are wanting to include things which are not
included in Fedora (such as the bcm firmware) and then distribute the
result, you'll also need to remove the Fedora trademarks from the image

Jeremy