<trclass="field-odd field"><thclass="field-name">Authors:</th><tdclass="field-body">Brian C. Lane <<aclass="reference external"href="mailto:bcl%40redhat.com">bcl<span>@</span>redhat<span>.</span>com</a>></td>
<aclass="reference external"href="https://github.com/rhinstaller/pykickstart">kickstart</a> and <aclass="reference external"href="https://github.com/rhinstaller/lorax">Lorax</a> to create bootable media that use the
same install path as a normal system installation. It can be used to make live
isos, bootable (partitioned) disk images, tarfiles, and filesystem images for
use with virtualization and container solutions like libvirt, docker, and
OpenStack.</p>
<p>The general idea is to use virt-install with kickstart and an Anaconda boot.iso to
install into a disk image and then use the disk image to create the bootable
media.</p>
<p>livemedia-creator –help will describe all of the options available. At the
minimum you need:</p>
<p><ttclass="docutils literal"><spanclass="pre">--make-iso</span></tt> to create a final bootable .iso or one of the other <ttclass="docutils literal"><spanclass="pre">--make-*</span></tt> options.</p>
<p><ttclass="docutils literal"><spanclass="pre">--iso</span></tt> to specify the Anaconda install media to use with virt-install.</p>
<p><ttclass="docutils literal"><spanclass="pre">--ks</span></tt> to select the kickstart file describing what to install.</p>
<p>To use livemedia-creator with virtualization you will need to have virt-install installed.</p>
<p>If you are going to be using Anaconda directly, with <ttclass="docutils literal"><spanclass="pre">--no-virt</span></tt> mode, make sure
you have the anaconda-tui package installed.</p>
<p>Conventions used in this document:</p>
<p><ttclass="docutils literal"><spanclass="pre">lmc</span></tt> is an abbreviation for livemedia-creator.</p>
<p><ttclass="docutils literal"><spanclass="pre">builder</span></tt> is the system where livemedia-creator is being run</p>
<p><ttclass="docutils literal"><spanclass="pre">image</span></tt> is the disk image being created by running livemedia-creator</p>
<h2>livemedia-creator cmdline arguments<aclass="headerlink"href="#livemedia-creator-cmdline-arguments"title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h2>
<p>See the output from <ttclass="docutils literal"><spanclass="pre">livemedia-creator</span><spanclass="pre">--help</span></tt> for the commandline arguments.</p>
</div>
<divclass="section"id="quickstart">
<h2>Quickstart<aclass="headerlink"href="#quickstart"title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h2>
<p>You can observe the installation using vnc. The logs will show what port was
chosen, or you can use a specific port by passing it. eg. <ttclass="docutils literal"><spanclass="pre">--vnc</span><spanclass="pre">vnc:127.0.0.1:5</span></tt></p>
<p>This is usually a good idea when testing changes to the kickstart. lmc tries
to monitor the logs for fatal errors, but may not catch everything.</p>
</div>
<divclass="section"id="how-iso-creation-works">
<h2>How ISO creation works<aclass="headerlink"href="#how-iso-creation-works"title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h2>
<p>There are 2 stages, the install stage which produces a disk or filesystem image
as its output, and the boot media creation which uses the image as its input.
Normally you would run both stages, but it is possible to stop after the
install stage, by using <ttclass="docutils literal"><spanclass="pre">--image-only</span></tt>, or to skip the install stage and use
a previously created disk image by passing <ttclass="docutils literal"><spanclass="pre">--disk-image</span></tt> or <ttclass="docutils literal"><spanclass="pre">--fs-image</span></tt></p>
<p>When creating an iso virt-install boots using the passed Anaconda installer iso
and installs the system based on the kickstart. The <ttclass="docutils literal"><spanclass="pre">%post</span></tt> section of the
kickstart is used to customize the installed system in the same way that
current spin-kickstarts do.</p>
<p>livemedia-creator monitors the install process for problems by watching the
install logs. They are written to the current directory or to the base
directory specified by the –logfile command. You can also monitor the install
by using a vnc client. This is recommended when first modifying a kickstart,
since there are still places where Anaconda may get stuck without the log
monitor catching it.</p>
<p>The output from this process is a partitioned disk image. kpartx can be used
to mount and examine it when there is a problem with the install. It can also
be booted using kvm.</p>
<p>When creating an iso the disk image’s / partition is copied into a formatted
filesystem image which is then used as the input to lorax for creation of the
final media.</p>
<p>The final image is created by lorax, using the templates in /usr/share/lorax/live/
or the live directory below the directory specified by <ttclass="docutils literal"><spanclass="pre">--lorax-templates</span></tt>. The
templates are written using the Mako template system with some extra commands
added by lorax.</p>
</div>
<divclass="section"id="kickstarts">
<h2>Kickstarts<aclass="headerlink"href="#kickstarts"title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h2>
<p>The docs/ directory includes several example kickstarts, one to create a live
desktop iso using GNOME, and another to create a minimal disk image. When
creating your own kickstarts you should start with the minimal example, it
includes several needed packages that are not always included by dependencies.</p>
<p>Or you can use existing spin kickstarts to create live media with a few
changes. Here are the steps I used to convert the Fedora XFCE spin.</p>
<olclass="arabic">
<li><pclass="first">Flatten the xfce kickstart using ksflatten</p>
</li>
<li><pclass="first">Add zerombr so you don’t get the disk init dialog</p>
</li>
<li><pclass="first">Add clearpart –all</p>
</li>
<li><pclass="first">Add swap partition</p>
</li>
<li><pclass="first">bootloader target</p>
</li>
<li><pclass="first">Add shutdown to the kickstart</p>
</li>
<li><pclass="first">Add network –bootproto=dhcp –activate to activate the network
This works for F16 builds but for F15 and before you need to pass
something on the cmdline that activate the network, like sshd:</p>
<p>Documentation on the Mako template system can be found at the <aclass="reference external"href="http://docs.makotemplates.org/en/latest/index.html">Mako site</a></p>
<p>The name of the final output XML is appliance.xml, this can be changed with
<p>You can name the output image with <ttclass="docutils literal"><spanclass="pre">--image-name</span></tt> and set a label on the filesystem with <ttclass="docutils literal"><spanclass="pre">--fs-label</span></tt></p>
</div>
<divclass="section"id="tar-file-creation">
<h2>TAR File Creation<aclass="headerlink"href="#tar-file-creation"title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h2>
<p>The <ttclass="docutils literal"><spanclass="pre">--make-tar</span></tt> command can be used to create a tar of the root filesystem. By
default it is compressed using xz, but this can be changed using the
<ttclass="docutils literal"><spanclass="pre">--compression</span></tt> and <ttclass="docutils literal"><spanclass="pre">--compress-arg</span></tt> options. This option works with both virt and
no-virt install methods.</p>
<p>As with <ttclass="docutils literal"><spanclass="pre">--make-fsimage</span></tt> the kickstart should be limited to a single / partition.</p>
<h2>Atomic Live Image for PXE Boot<aclass="headerlink"href="#atomic-live-image-for-pxe-boot"title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h2>
<p>The <ttclass="docutils literal"><spanclass="pre">--make-ostree-live</span></tt> command will produce the same result as <ttclass="docutils literal"><spanclass="pre">--make-pxe-live</span></tt>
for installations of Atomic Host. Example kickstart for such an installation
using Atomic installer iso with local repo included in the image can be found
in docs/rhel-atomic-pxe-live.ks.</p>
<p>The PXE images can also be created with <ttclass="docutils literal"><spanclass="pre">--no-virt</span></tt> by using the example
kickstart in docs/rhel-atomic-pxe-live-novirt.ks. This also works inside the
mock environment.</p>
</div>
<divclass="section"id="debugging-problems">
<h2>Debugging problems<aclass="headerlink"href="#debugging-problems"title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h2>
<p>Sometimes an installation will get stuck. When using virt-install the logs will
be written to ./virt-install.log and most of the time any problems that happen
will be near the end of the file. lmc tries to detect common errors and will
cancel the installation when they happen. But not everything can be caught.
When creating a new kickstart it is helpful to use vnc so that you can monitor
the installation as it happens, and if it gets stuck without lmc detecting the
problem you can switch to tty1 and examine the system directly.</p>
<p>If it does get stuck the best way to cancel is to use kill -9 on the virt-install pid,
lmc will detect that the process died and cleanup.</p>
<p>If lmc didn’t handle the cleanup for some reason you can do this:
1. <ttclass="docutils literal"><spanclass="pre">sudo</span><spanclass="pre">umount</span><spanclass="pre">/tmp/lmc-XXXX</span></tt> to unmount the iso from its mountpoint.
3. <ttclass="docutils literal"><spanclass="pre">sudo</span><spanclass="pre">rm</span><spanclass="pre">/var/tmp/lmc-disk-XXXXX</span></tt> to remove the disk image.</p>
<p>Note that lmc uses the lmc- prefix for all of its temporary files and
directories to make it easier to find and clean up leftovers.</p>
<p>The logs from the virt-install run are stored in virt-install.log, logs from
livemedia-creator are in livemedia.log and program.log</p>
<p>You can add <ttclass="docutils literal"><spanclass="pre">--image-only</span></tt> to skip the .iso creation and examine the resulting
disk image. Or you can pass <ttclass="docutils literal"><spanclass="pre">--keep-image</span></tt> to keep it around after the iso has
been created.</p>
<p>Cleaning up aborted <ttclass="docutils literal"><spanclass="pre">--no-virt</span></tt> installs can sometimes be accomplished by
running the <ttclass="docutils literal"><spanclass="pre">anaconda-cleanup</span></tt> script. As of Fedora 18 anaconda is
multi-threaded and it can sometimes become stuck and refuse to exit. When this
happens you can usually clean up by first killing the anaconda process then
<h2>Hacking<aclass="headerlink"href="#hacking"title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h2>
<p>Development on this will take place as part of the lorax project, and on the
anaconda-devel-list mailing list, and <aclass="reference external"href="https://github.com/rhinstaller/lorax">on github</a></p>
<p>Feedback, enhancements and bugs are welcome. You can use <aclass="reference external"href="https://bugzilla.redhat.com/enter_bug.cgi?product=Fedora&component=lorax">bugzilla</a> to
report bugs against the lorax component.</p>
</div>
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