[Fedora-livecd-list] What is kadischi capable of ?

Toshio Kuratomi a.badger at gmail.com
Sat Dec 2 03:33:43 UTC 2006


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
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