INTRO ----- livemedia-creator uses Anaconda, kickstart and Lorax to create bootable media that use the same install path as a normal system install. It can be used to make live isos, bootable (partitioned) disk images and filesystem images for use with virtualization. The general idea is to use virt-install to install into a disk image and then use the disk image to create the bootable media. livemedia-creator --help will describe all of the options available. At the minimum you need: --make-iso to create a final bootable .iso --iso to specify the Anaconda install media to use with virt-install --ks is the kickstart to use to install the system To use livemedia-creator with virt-install you will need to install the following packages, as well as have libvirtd setup correctly. virt-install libvirt-python If you are going to be using Anaconda directly, with --no-virt mode, make sure you have the anaconda package installed. QUICKSTART ---------- sudo livemedia-creator --make-iso \ --iso=/extra/iso/Fedora-18-x86_64-netinst.iso --ks=./docs/fedora-livemedia.ks If you are using the lorax git repo you can run it like so: sudo PATH=./src/sbin/:$PATH PYTHONPATH=./src/ ./src/sbin/livemedia-creator \ --make-iso --iso=/extra/iso/Fedora-18-x86_64-netinst.iso \ --ks=./docs/fedora-livemedia.ks --lorax-templates=./share/ If you want to watch the install you can pass '--vnc vnc' and use a vnc client to connect to localhost:0 This is usually a good idea when testing changes to the kickstart. It tries to monitor the logs for fatal errors, but may not catch everything. HOW IT WORKS ------------ 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 have it run both stages, but it is possible to have it stop after the install stage, using --image-only, or to have it skip the install stage and use a previously created disk image by passing --disk-image or --fs-image When creating an iso virt-install boots using the passed Anaconda installer iso and installs the system based on the kickstart. The %post section of the kickstart is used to customize the installed system in the same way that current spin-kickstarts do. 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 passing --vnc vnc and 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. 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. When creating an iso the disk image's / partition is copied into a formatted disk image which is then used as the input to lorax for creation of the final media. The final image is created by lorax, using the templates in /usr/share/lorax/ or the directory specified by --lorax-templates Currently the standard lorax templates are used to make a bootable iso, but it should be possible to modify them to output other results. They are written using the Mako template system which is very flexible. KICKSTARTS ---------- The docs/ directory includes two example kickstarts, one to create a live desktop iso using GNOME, and the other 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. livemedia-creator parses the 'part /' entry to determine how big a disk image needs to be created. This means that the common kickstart technique of using %pre to generate a partition scheme for use with %include will not work. There needs to be a 'part /' entry in the main part of the kickstart. Only one kickstart file is supported, so if your kickstart is built from a number of %include commands it needs to be flattened into a single file with ksflatten first. 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. 1. Flatten the xfce kickstart using ksflatten 2. Add zerombr so you don't get the disk init dialog 3. Add clearpart --all 4. Add swap partition 5. bootloader target 6. Add shutdown to the kickstart 7. 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. livemedia-creator --kernel-args="sshd" 8. Add a root password rootpw rootme network --bootproto=dhcp --activate zerombr clearpart --all bootloader --location=mbr part swap --size=512 shutdown 9. In the livesys script section of the %post remove the root password. This really depends on how the spin wants to work. You could add the live user that you create to the %wheel group so that sudo works if you wanted to. passwd -d root > /dev/null 10. Remove /etc/fstab in %post, dracut handles mounting the rootfs cat /dev/null > /dev/fstab Do this only for live iso's, the filesystem will be mounted read only if there is no /etc/fstab 11. Don't delete initramfs files from /boot in %post 12. Have dracut-config-generic, grub2-efi, shim, memtest86+, isomd5sum and syslinux in the package list 13. Omit dracut-config-rescue from the package list "-dracut-config-rescue" One drawback to using virt-install is that it pulls the packages from the repo each time you run it. To speed things up you either need a local mirror of the packages, or you can use a caching proxy. When using a proxy you pass it to livemedia-creator like so: --proxy=http://proxy.yourdomain.com:3128 You also need to use a specific mirror instead of mirrormanager so that the packages will get cached, so your kickstart url would look like: url --url="http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/development/17/x86_64/os/" You can also add an update repo, but don't name it updates. Add --proxy to it as well. UEFI Disk Image Creation ------------------------ When making a live iso the bootloader is added after Anaconda has run. As long as anaconda-tools and grub2-efi-*-cdboot are included in the kickstart the iso will be bootable on UEFI systems. To create a disk image, eg. using rhel7-minimal.ks, livemedia-creator needs to be run from a UEFI system or virt running UEFI firmware. ANACONDA IMAGE INSTALL ---------------------- You can create images without using virt-install by passing --no-virt on the cmdline. This will use Anaconda's directory install feature to handle the install. There are a couple of things to keep in mind when doing this: 1. It will be most reliable when building images for the same release that the host is running. Because Anaconda has expectations about the system it is running under you may encounter strange bugs if you try to build newer or older releases. 2. Make sure selinux is set to permissive or disabled. It won't install correctly with selinux set to enforcing yet. 3. It may totally trash your host. So far I haven't had this happen, but the possibility exists that a bug in Anaconda could result in it operating on real devices. I recommend running it in a virt or on a system that you can afford to lose all data from. The logs from anaconda will be placed in an ./anaconda/ directory in either the current directory or in the directory used for --logfile Example cmdline: sudo livemedia-creator --make-iso --no-virt --ks=./fedora-livemedia.ks AMI IMAGES ---------- Amazon EC2 images can be created by using the --make-ami switch and an appropriate kickstart file. All of the work to customize the image is handled by the kickstart. The example currently included was modified from the cloud-kickstarts version so that it would work with livemedia-creator. Example cmdline: sudo livemedia-creator --make-ami --iso=/path/to/boot.iso --ks=./docs/fedora-livemedia-ec2.ks This will produce an ami-root.img file in the working directory. At this time I have not tested the image with EC2. Feedback would we welcome. APPLIANCE CREATION ------------------ livemedia-creator can now replace appliance-tools by using the --make-appliance switch. This will create the partitioned disk image and an XML file that can be used with virt-image to setup a virtual system. The XML is generated using the Mako template from /usr/share/lorax/appliance/libvirt.xml You can use a different template by passing --app-template