Building a Fedora 13 Beta Remix
Submitted by Scott Dowdle on Sat, 2010-05-01 09:21.
Fedora | MontanaLinux
From attending Jesse Keating's talk about the upcoming features in Fedora 13 I learned that the rawhide repository has been split in an effort to provide a more stable build environment for Fedora releases. I also learned that it is a good idea to disable the updates-testing repo to help avoid potential breakage. Jesse also said that at some point during the upgrade cycle that the Beta will turn into the release version. With the new information, I decided that it wasn't too early build my MontanaLinux Fedora remix.
I had installed the Beta on a couple of physical and virtual machines and was fairly impressed with it so I decided to go ahead with the remix effort. First I would have to find all of the repository URLs to pull the packages from. That wasn't too difficult... just look at the files in /etc/yum.repos.d/ on a Fedora 13 Beta system.
To save on bandwidth over many builds I decided to rsync the entire development tree down so I would have a local copy. The i386 devel tree is about 19GB with 16,787 packages. The x86_64 devel tree is 21GB with 20,811 packages. I also have to rsync every day or two to keep up with package updates.
The RPM Fusion folks already have packages for Fedora 13 and the existing Adobe packages work fine on the Fedora 13 Beta as well so the this remix will be pretty close my previous remixes.
I am building from within a Fedora 13 Beta KVM virtual machine. I composed the first build yesterday and installed it on my netbook last night. I have noticed a few glitches in my initial package selection. For example I installed sugar* and that brought all of the sugar packages including sugar-logos which is a boot-time Plymouth animation. As a result, booting my netbook for the first time after install showed the Sugar animation which I wasn't expecting at all. Also the number of packages I had was right on the edge of 2GB and I wanted to insure that it would continue to fit on a 2GB USB thumbdrive... so I decided to update the package set. I decided to remove sugar completely because that would free up some room and get rid of unwanted boot animation.
I'm doing a second compose right now. We'll see how that turns out.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| fedora-live-base.ks | 12.32 KB |
| MontanaLinux.ks | 4.3 KB |
| makeiso | 106 bytes |
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Future improvements
Submitted by Scott Dowdle on Tue, 2010-05-11 08:40.
Yes I definitely need to quit doing my minor modifications manually during the build process and automate it by putting the steps into the kickstart file. Then of course the step after that would be to build a couple of custom .rpm packages that hold all of my minor modifications.
Regarding compressing it down to a CD... I don't think so... because it is already being compressed just to fit in 1.9GB. In fact in installed system from the LiveDVD ends up taking up about 5GB of disk space if I remember correctly. The only way to make it fit on a LiveCD would be to greatly scale back the package set... which is what the stock Fedora LiveCDs are. Notice how they don't have a lot of software and that is because it just won't fit. Ubuntu has had similar problems and gone through the quandry of what to remove to get it all to fit.
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MontanaLinux-F13-002-i686.iso works great
Submitted by Scott Dowdle on Sat, 2010-05-01 13:51.
The second build came out much better. I installed it on the Acer Aspire One D150 netbook (from which I'm typing) and it works great. It has all of the software I want pre-installed (1,751 packages @ 5.1GB used disk space) and takes about 15 minutes to install from LiveUSB. The "Montana in the Spring" picture I borrowed from teh Interwebs looks pretty sweet too. If anyone wants a copy, just email me (dowdle@montanalinux.org) and I'll reply back with the URL. It's a 1.9GB download.
I'll continue to follow updated packages until the final release.
I still need to build the x86_64 version.
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Based in your Fedora remix video I build my first one, It worked
Now can't wait to go with Fedora 13, really like the idea of have rsync the repository to generate it from your local files, I never done this but sounds like the way to go.
Also like to have the custom splash image replaced by the install script without have to change to an interactive shell during build...
Let me ask you something, would it be possible to compress the 1.9 GB into a Live CD ?
I'm using a small netbook ACER 150, currently booting 5 different OS. Being Fedora the primary distro from GRUB.
Keep doing the great job.
Dinooz