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.

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