What is kadischi capable of ?

[Andy Trayford]

Hi All,

I've been a watcher here for a while now, and have also tried out
kadischi on FC5.

What I really need and think a liveCD generation tool should offer is as
follows:

-          Bootable customised version of chosen distribution

-          Ability to make the distribution as "Light" or minimalistic
as possible.
this includes chopping down an X solution (i.e. XFCE/fluxbox) as small
as possible.

-          Total package choice independancy without having to install
buckets of dependencies.

-          Media delivery options: USB / CD / DVD.

-          Cross Platform: PowerPC (IBM & Mac), X86, X86-64, Solaris,
Itanium (efi).
By Cross Platform I mean ability to produce same configuration on all
Distro supported architecture.

-          Minimal or no boot menu's: i.e. complete hardware auto
detection or Menu customisation.
possibly only configure IP address by menu choice ?

-          Custom Boot splash or no boot splash.

There are many minimalistic distro's like DSL or comprehensive ones like
Knoppix.

Under standard liveCD tools it seems impossible to create a replica
distro like either of these without creating a heavily bloated DVD
image.

Does Fedora have the capability of reproducing such distro's for its
supported architecture list.

My reason is to use a specific application in both X & Cmdline, and
useable in our labs on all platforms, on the smallest media possible.

Currently I believe from the discussions I am seeing that its barely
possible for fedora to even complete any kind of liveCD, although Jdogs
pilgrim seems to be the closest in theory ? is pilgrim available and
useable ? or have I got the wrong idea about pilgrim? (I haven't seen a
website for pilgrim).

If anyone has any positive info on how fedora could be used to match my
requests, I would be very interested to test and use on all platforms.

Thanks All

Andy T

[Jane Dogalt]

--- Andy Trayford  wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I've been a watcher here for a while now, and have also tried out
> kadischi on FC5.
>
> What I really need and think a liveCD generation tool should offer is
> as
> follows:
>      Bootable customised version of chosen distribution
>
>      Ability to make the distribution as "Light" or
>
> minimalistic
> as possible.
> this includes chopping down an X solution (i.e. XFCE/fluxbox) as
> small
> as possible.

I totally agree.  Back when my unreleased livecd generating tool was
based on mandrake-7.0 and urpmi, I accomplished this using the the
'minimal' install option (I think redhat might have also had this in
the distant past).  I actually had X+windowmaker+xmms+firefox in <100M,
so that it could fit on a 3" CDR with some space left over for your
mp3s.

I do plan on targeting the same type of thing with my as-yet purely
vaporware tool.  Though these days I might be happy if I can get <1G
leaving some room to spare on a 1G usb drive, or 3" dvdr.
>      Total package choice independancy without having to
>
> install
> buckets of dependencies.

Thats just yum, and a general critique of dependency 'bugs' in fedora. 
If you can find specific packages that don't really depend on something
else, and can figure a better way to package them, I'd guess fedora
would adopt your build patch in a heartbeat.
>      Media delivery options: USB / CD / DVD.

Or even PXE, QEMU, and general tgz images, perhaps with a way to push
those images on a local or remote system.   But you listed the
important ones.
>      Cross Platform: PowerPC (IBM & Mac), X86, X86-64, Solaris,
>
> Itanium (efi).
> By Cross Platform I mean ability to produce same configuration on all
> Distro supported architecture.

Yup.  Maybe even the ability to make a single image that can boot
multiple arches???  I wonder if you can make a bootable iso that boots
both ppc and i386.  I think I've heard rumors of that in the past.
>      Minimal or no boot menu's: i.e. complete hardware auto
>
> detection or Menu customisation.

I totally agree.  I call this 'physically portable linux'.  I.e. your
workstation on your ipod, and it 'just works' when you take your
workstation with you.  Honestly though, just disabling fc6's firstboot,
gets you pretty close these days.  Maybe with an Xorg -configure
invocation as well.
> possibly only configure IP address by menu choice ?
>      Custom Boot splash or no boot splash.

The one thats really tough, which was one of my better achievements
with mandrake-8.1, is total bootsplash, I.e. never seeing a text
character at all.  And never seeing a useless desktop.  I.e. hide the
desktop with a full screen 'loading' until the system aquiesces and the
user can dive right in.
> There are many minimalistic distro's like DSL or comprehensive ones
> like
> Knoppix.
>
> Under standard liveCD tools it seems impossible to create a replica
> distro like either of these without creating a heavily bloated DVD
> image.

Yeah, livecd tools have _a lot_ of room for improvement.  I can't
believe that there still isn't(?) a simple command line script to
generate knoppix purely from up to date debian installation sources.
> Does Fedora have the capability of reproducing such distro's for its
> supported architecture list.

I think pungi (gotta love redhat's project naming skills...  not) is
what you want to look at.
> My reason is to use a specific application in both X & Cmdline, and
> useable in our labs on all platforms, on the smallest media possible.
>
> Currently I believe from the discussions I am seeing that its barely
> possible for fedora to even complete any kind of liveCD, although
> Jdogs
> pilgrim seems to be the closest in theory ? is pilgrim available and
> useable ? or have I got the wrong idea about pilgrim? (I haven't seen
> a
> website for pilgrim).

Pilgrim is DavidZ's project.  All I've posted so far are 6 year old
mandrake isos that have critical bugs that need to be, and wont be
fixed, and one unionfs+squashfs proof of concept iso and initialization
for fc5, which was nothing but proof of concept of that mechanism (for
fc5).

If you search the archives of this list, you should be able to track
down the pilgrim release url and instructions.
> If anyone has any positive info on how fedora could be used to match
> my
> requests, I would be very interested to test and use on all
> platforms.

I'm working on a lot of the features you described above, but don't
count on me.  (but I'll try here in a couple weeks when my heavy
academic workload turns into a light workload).

-dmc/jdog
> Thanks All
>
> Andy T
> > --
>
> Fedora-livecd-list mailing list
> [e-mail]
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-livecd-list

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[Rahul Sundaram]

Jane Dogalt wrote:
> > Does Fedora have the capability of reproducing such distro's for its
> > supported architecture list.
>
> I think pungi (gotta love redhat's project naming skills...  not) is
> what you want to look at.

Pungi is not a Red Hat project. The project announcement said so clearly.

Rahul

[Jesse Keating]

On Friday 01 December 2006 11:11, Jane Dogalt wrote:
> I think pungi (gotta love redhat's project naming skills...  not) is
> what you want to look at.

Oh come on, how could I NOT call a tool that fiddles with Anaconda "pungi" ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pungi

(the name didn't actually come from me though, it was suggested to me by 
somebody who does not work for Red Hat)

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Fri, 2006-12-01 at 04:59 -0800, Andy Trayford wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I’ve been a watcher here for a while now, and have also tried out
> kadischi on FC5.

I've done some of these things with kadischi and a few custom
post-install script.
>     Bootable customised version of chosen distribution

kadischi does this.
>     Ability to make the distribution as “Light” or minimalistic
>
> as possible.
> this includes chopping down an X solution (i.e. XFCE/fluxbox) as small
> as possible.

I made my liveCD with matchboxWM with no bells and whistles.  I had to
compile my own rpm for this and put it in my repository but that is
pretty trivial.  This was very lightweight but not necessarily the best
solution for your needs.
>     Total package choice independancy without having to install
>
> buckets of dependencies.

This ended up being a major piece of my post_install scripts.
Anaconda's kickstart is supposed to allow selecting and deselecting
packages but I wasn't able to make it work for me.  So I wrote a
post_install script to remove extraneous packages and their deps from
the livecd's installroot before creating the squashfs filesystem.

In the end, I had a livecd that was 185MB but that included some hacky
postinstall scripts that removed locales, docs, man pages, etc.
>     Media delivery options: USB / CD / DVD.

I only had to worry about CD delivery so I didn't do any work on the
other three.
>     Cross Platform: PowerPC (IBM & Mac), X86, X86-64, Solaris,
>
> Itanium (efi).
> By Cross Platform I mean ability to produce same configuration on all
> Distro supported architecture.

This sort of worked.  It was early FC5 and I was able to build an x86 CD
on an x86 builder; x86_64 CD on an x86_64 builder.  There was no reason
it couldn't work the same way on any supported architecture.  The bugs I
had open regarding not being able to build, say x86 on an x86_64 box
have been fixed but I haven't had an opportunity to test this again so I
don't know what the current status is.
>     Minimal or no boot menu’s: i.e. complete hardware auto
>
> detection or Menu customisation.
> possibly only configure IP address by menu choice ?

I had complete hardware autodetection in FC5.  Since this is a constant
area of improvement in Fedora, I expect that FC6 is even better at this.
For instance, I had to run a custom script to autoconfigure X and write
out xorg.conf in FC5.  FC6's X is supposed to autodetect hardware if
there's no xorg.conf so this step might not be necessary.
>     Custom Boot splash or no boot splash.

I didn't use rhgb, preferring to look into gensplash or splashy instead.
The livecd work I was doing was cancelled before I had a chance to merge
either one.
> There are many minimalistic distro’s like DSL or comprehensive ones
> like Knoppix.
>
> Under standard liveCD tools it seems impossible to create a replica
> distro like either of these without creating a heavily bloated DVD
> image.
>
> Does Fedora have the capability of reproducing such distro’s for its
> supported architecture list.

DSL is an impossible goal.  They've made some choices (such as compiling
against gtk1 and sticking to the 2.4 kernel)  that simply aren't
compatible with Fedora's goals.  My work with kadischi makes me
confident that something similar to Knoppix is definitely doable.

Remember, though, that even knoppix is not straight Debian.  They have
modified the init scripts and other pieces of the OS to reduce
dependencies, make things smaller, and otherwise optimized the OS for
their use case at the expense of no longer being 100% debian.
> My reason is to use a specific application in both X & Cmdline, and
> useable in our labs on all platforms, on the smallest media possible.
>
> Currently I believe from the discussions I am seeing that its barely
> possible for fedora to even complete any kind of liveCD, although
> Jdogs pilgrim seems to be the closest in theory ? is pilgrim available
> and useable ? or have I got the wrong idea about pilgrim? (I haven’t
> seen a website for pilgrim).

I think this should be possible with kadischi using a kickstart file and
a set of custom post_install scripts  (As I said, my first hack,
minimalist kadischi build was 185 MB.)

I wasn't able to get pilgrim to generate a working CD image when I tried
but others I've talked to have.  It looks even more suited to what
you're doing in some regards.  It's very commandline oriented and it
takes a list of packages upon which it runs yum to resolve deps and
install what is necessary to make those work.  I had some hesitations
about some of David Zeuthen's architecture choices (having scripts in
the configure file, for instance) but those might have been good
choices; I didn't play much with it after I failed to get a CD that
would run.

-Toshio