snorp.net

I was out of town for part of hack week, so I didn’t participate fully like my colleagues. I did get a couple evenings to mess around with something, though. I wrote an installer for KIWI-generated LiveCDs.

First page of live installer

It’s still in early development and has lots of hacks to make things work, but it does manage to install a working system onto your machine. The installation itself is really pretty simple. The LiveCD data is in a compressed squashfs image on the CD, and the installer just copies all of that to the disk. Then it just writes out an fstab, installs grub, etc.

As usual, however, the devil is in the details. Things like sound and video card detection are normally done by the YaST installer, so other methods must be used. It might be possible to invoke the relevant bits of YaST from the LiveCD installer to achieve the same effect, but I haven’t looked into it yet. I have everything checked into svn (svn://snorp.net/trunk/opensuse-live), so if you want to try and build a CD everything is there. I will also upload an ISO soonish.

Update: You can download a full ISO based on openSUSE Alpha 5 here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 2:21 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.