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Creating a Live CD with Kadischi

Last week Ladislav Bodnar covered the Linux-Live method of creating custom Slackware-based live CDs. This week I thought I'd look at a much newer project, Kadischi, to create a Fedora-based live CD. Kadischi is still in early development and unfortunately I was unable to create a working CD in the brief time that I spent working with it.

Kadischi is well documented with translations available in French, Netherlands and Swedish. For the most part I found myself copying commands straight from the documentation into a root terminal.

I started out on Tuesday evening, after finishing up LWN's daily updates, by booting up a box with Fedora Core 4 previously installed. Soon I had the Kadischi documentation in a web browser and a terminal su'ed to root.

Step one is to make sure you have all the required packages. So I did yum install and ran into a minor hiccup. Red Hat, including fedora.redhat.com, was down for maintenance. This didn't affect the wiki site, or any repositories, but I couldn't get to http://fedora.redhat.com/download/mirrors/, where yum was looking for a good mirror to use. After editing a few repo files to look for a particular repository instead of mirror list I was able grab the packages I needed. The anaconda package requires a couple of patches to enable the --livecd option. The documentation told me what to type and soon had mine patched.

Step two is get the Kadischi code, which is currently only available from CVS. Once again the commands you need are in the documentation, ready to paste or type into a terminal, and I had my own version of Kadischi. During the 'make install' I noticed a few complaints about undefined macros, and I didn't really pay any attention to them. That was undoubtedly a mistake. Those who pay more attention to such details will, no doubt, fare better.

You can tell Kadischi to build your ISO image anywhere you like on your system. The default is /tmp. Then you enter the basic command:

    kadischi path-to-the-repository path-to-the-iso-image

You can build your own repository or use an existing Fedora repository. You can also choose to run Anaconda interactively or automatically using kickstart files. I tried it with a pointer to the Fedora Core 4 mirror list (once that was available again) and told it to create /tmp/fedora-live.iso and found myself running Anaconda in my terminal. I chose a basic desktop install and let Anaconda do it's thing. Once Anaconda was done with it's part, Kadischi started running post-install scripts, and in theory after that you would have an ISO image ready to burn into a CD. Instead I ended up with:

Overall I thought it went pretty well for a first try of a beta product. Most people with a little software experience, especially if they are more motivated to actually create live CDs, should not have a problem getting Kadischi to build and run. The use of custom repositories and kickstart scripts make Kadischi highly flexible allowing for the creation of highly customized Fedora CDs.

Comments (2 posted)

New Releases

Announcing Fedora Core 5 Test 3

The Fedora Project has announced the third release of the Fedora Core 5 development cycle, available for the i386, x86_64, and PPC/PPC64 architectures. "Beware that Test releases are recommended only for Linux experts/enthusiasts or for technology evaluation, as many parts are likely to be broken and the rate of change is rapid." According to the current schedule the final release is due on March 15.

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Openwall GNU/*/Linux (Owl) 2.0 released

Owl 2.0, a security-enhanced distribution put together by Solar Designer and colleagues, is now available. "Owl 2.0 is built around Linux kernel 2.4.32-ow1, glibc 2.3.6 (with our security enhancements), gcc 3.4.5, and recent versions of over 100 other packages. It offers binary- and package-level compatibility for most packages intended for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (RHEL4) and Fedora Core 3 (FC3), as well as for many FC4 packages."

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SUSE Linux 10.1 Beta4 seeks adventurous experts and their *test* systems

The openSUSE Project has released a fourth beta of SUSE Linux 10.1. "Beta4 has a number of ROUGH edges, so read the following before you decide to download and test it. I advise to not put it on any production system!" That said, you can find out more about known bugs and a list of mirror sites in the announcement (click below).

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Ubuntu Flight CD 4

The Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Edubuntu Flight CD 4 is ready for testing. This is the fourth snapshot of the current development version "Dapper Drake". While it is believed to be reasonably free of showstopper CD-build or installer bugs, it is not recommended for production systems. Edubuntu has its own announcement.

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Distribution News

Ubuntu Dapper news

Xgl and compiz packages are available in universe for Dapper. "As noted before, these are highly experimental packages. If it crashes, this is unsurprising. Please do feel free to file bugs, but right now they'll probably just be forwarded upstream. Please do not be surprised if it doesn't work. If you're running binary drivers, things get even more complicated and there's a reasonable chance that things will fail to work in strange and unexpected ways."

Ben Collins has issued a call for testing of the current Dapper kernel. "The main point of this testing (for me at least) is to catch regressions from breezy. It is far more important for us to make sure we don't lose users because of a non-upgrade issue, than to fix a long standing superficial quirk."

Meanwhile, the feature freeze for Dapper has been announced. "The feature freeze for Dapper begins this Thursday, February 23rd. This means that feature goal development be substantially complete. Features which are behind schedule may be granted exceptions (for priority goals with a clear roadmap to completion) or deferred to the next release."

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Yellow Dog Linux v4.1 now available from the Terra Soft Store

Terra Soft Solutions has announced the availability of Yellow Dog Linux v4.1 at the Terra Soft on-line Store.

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New CMS for FedoraNEWS.ORG

A new CMS (Content Management System) for FedoraNEWS.ORG has been launched. This new site allows Fedora users to self-register and submit stories, it has RSS feeds for stories, calendars for Fedora events, and more.

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Debian mirror split, amd64 update

Anthony Towns has an update on the mirror split and on amd64.

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New Distributions

Kaboot

Kaboot is a Gentoo-based Linux LiveCD/USB distribution. It's currently available in four flavors, Recovery, Lite, Science and Kaboot Komplete (a full-featured KDE desktop). (Found in this week's edition of the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter.

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Distribution Newsletters

Fedora Weekly News Issue 34

This edition of the Fedora Weekly News covers Red Hat Magazine February 2006, Fedora Project Wiki Policy Change Update, OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) Base Software, Tools to roll your own distribution - Kadischi, Must-have Firefox and Thunderbird extensions, Google Windows apps coming to Linux, New CMS for FedoraNEWS.ORG, and more.

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Gentoo Weekly Newsletter

The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for the week of February 20, 2006 covers the opening of FOSDEM next Saturday, Qmail request for comments, yet another Gentoo-based distribution, Gentoo on Intel Macs, and several other topics.

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DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 139

The DistroWatch Weekly for February 20, 2006 is out. "Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu Linux and one of the most prominent personalities of the Free Software world, is the focus of today's issue. The featured article is then followed by a news round-up quoting Mandriva's position on Xgl, discussing the current delays in the development of both SUSE Linux 10.1 and Fedora Core 5, revealing "Ebuntu", a new Ubuntu derivative with Enlightenment 17, and monitoring the career path of Daniel Robbins, the founder of Gentoo Linux. The issue concludes with the usual sections detailing the upcoming releases and new distributions."

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Package updates

Fedora updates

Updates for Fedora Core 4: netpbm (make xwdtopnm work on x86_64), compat-db (bug fixes), kdebase (bug fixes), hplip (upgrade to 0.9.8), xterm (upgrade to upstream v208), kdemultimedia (bug fixes).

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Slackware updates

The Slackware change log entry for February 16 shows that everything using libreadline.so.4 has been recompiled, with the exception of AbiWord. "the --disable-gnome option no longer seems to work with abiword-2.4.2 -- it still demands libgnomeprint and all of its dependencies. Anyone know a way around this one? If not, AbiWord will likely be removed soon." There are lots of additional updates and new gnupg packages in testing. The next entry shows updates to dvd+rw-tools, bind and tin.

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Newsletters and articles of interest

Design a custom network install image with Instalinux (Linux.com)

Linux.com looks at another method of creating a custom Linux system. "Former Hewlett-Packard employee Chris Slater has created Instalinux.com, a site based on HP's Linux Common Operating Environment (LinuxCOE) System Designer. Instalinux lets you build a custom Linux boot image and perform network installs quickly, especially when you have several machines with the same requirements. I tested Instalinux recently, with good results."

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My desktop OS: Slackware 10.2 (NewsForge)

NewsForge has a quick look at Slackware 10.2. "Slackware installation and configuration requires some Linux knowledge. The distribution is not as user-friendly as other Linux packages. When making partitions you need to use fdisk or cfdisk. After installing the software on my laptop, I configured the kernel to activate ACPI and other important hardware by following documentation that you can find on the Internet about kernel compilation."

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Distribution reviews

The evolution of Fedora Core Linux (LinuxNoob)

Niall C. Brady looks at Fedora Core. "I use Fedora core daily and I've used every final release of Fedora since Yarrow (Fedora Core Release 1). When I get time, I also look at some of the test releases to see how Fedora is changing, and if there's one thing certain about Fedora, it's change. I decided to write this article to hopefully give people a chance to learn a little bit more about Fedora since the first release came to life back in November 2003, how the distro has matured and what to expect for Fedora Core release 5 in mid-March 2006."

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