Oracle Linux 7 RC Released - Another RHEL 7 Clone

Oracle Linux 7 RC - KDE 4 with FirefoxI noticed on DistroWatch yesterday that Oracle released Oracle Linux 7 RC... with RC being "release candidate". Having done all of the work recently building a CentOS 7 Public QA LiveDVD as well as OpenVZ OS Templates I thought I'd give it a try with Oracle Linux. The race is on. Who will release GA first? CentOS or Oracle?

Oracle is a little different - First of all, I'm not even sure what the name of the thing is. I've heard of OEL (Oracle Enterprise Linux), Oracle Linux, and a few other names. I think I'll just call it OEL. OEL is a pay distro *BUT* they do offer free downloads of their install media as well as updates. Originally updates were pay-only but they opened that up a while back when they had a promotional campaign claiming they were faster with updates than CentOS (turns out they aren't but close). I guess their business plan is you can use OEL for free and have updates... but there are some value add features (like Ksplice and Dtrace, etc) and support that cost extra. To download their iso install media you have to have an account on their system but that is cost-free and it just so happens I already had one because I've downloaded previous releases like OEL6.

Setting up the LiveDVD build environment - I downloaded the install media. I copied all of the .rpm files from the install media to a directory on a local web server and ran "createrepo ." within that directory. Then I made a four line oracle-7-rc.repo file pointing to the local package repo I just made.

Then I booted the install DVD inside of a newly created KVM virtual machine and did an install selecting that I wanted a GUI desktop (this is Server install media and "minimal" is the default) which is GNOME 3... and added to that the KDE desktop environment. After the install was over the machine was up and running. Then I installed the livecd-tools package previously mentioned made by that CentOS guy. Oracle was missing two perl-something-something packages needed for the livecd-tools dependencies so I just copied the missing two packages (along with the livecd-tools packages and epel-release) to my Oracle 7 RC package repo directory and re-ran createrepo. BTW, you don't have to turn off SELinux anymore for livecd-creator to work. That probably changed a long time ago but I only recently noticed. Ding, build environment complete.

Oracle Linux 7 RC - GNOME 3 ClassicFixing up the kickstart - Then I copied my centos-7-pubqa.ks kickstart file and modified it. Within that kickstart I had referred to a number of package groups but in my local package repo package groups weren't working well for me. I don't know if package group names are different between CentOS and Oracle (probably) or if I needed more package metadata than I had with my simple, local package repository. As a result I needed to cough up a more complete and accurate package list for my kickstart. Hey, I liked the install I had in my KVM machine so I just did an 'rpm -qa --qf "%{n}\n" | sort > packages.txt' to generate a complete package list with the version portion stripped off suitable for a kickstart file. I emptied out everything in the package section of the kickstart an then just inserted the contents of the packages.txt file. Then I ran livecd-creator giving it the appropriate flags to generate an iso from the kickstart with the desired name (oracle-7-rc-001-x86_64.iso). After about an hour and approximately 1,400 packages... I had a 1.2GB .iso. I then tested that inside of a KVM virtual machine and it worked great... both as a try-it-before-you-install-it Live Desktop... and as an installer too.

OpenVZ OS Template building - I took the scripts (regular and minimal) I had created for CentOS 7 Public QA to build OpenVZ OS Templates and made the minor modifications needed to point to my local Oracle package repo. I had to change a few of the package names (like centos-release became oraclelinux-release and centos-logos became oracle-logos... and had to add in the rhn-client-tools package) and the desired output file name... but other than that, a simple edit. Those took about 10 minutes to build. I copied the .tar.xz files over to an OpenVZ host node and made a few containers to test things out. They worked as expected.

What else is different? - Turns out Oracle didn't have packages for LibreOffice on their install DVD. I thought that was weird because they had GNOME 3, KDE and some desktop applications including Firefox, GIMP, and Inkscape... but no LibreOffice. I assume after GA happens and their full package repositories become available that those packages will be included. The DVD includes just a little shy of 4,300 packages.

Where to go from here? - I will be releasing the OpenVZ OS Templates after Oracle's GA release but I don't think I can publicly release the LiveDVD as that might violate their license agreement. I don't read legalize so I'm not certain, but I just showed you above how you can make your own. I've attached the .ks I used as well as the scripts for OpenVZ to this post. You'll have to put in the correct URL for your own local repo or the one made available by Oracle after GA. And of course you'll want to modify the package set as desired. My kickstart probably has a some junk in it left over from the Fedora kickstart I based it on, but it does build and work just fine. Feel free to clean it up and make it more perfect if you want.

Enjoy!