How to build a live Fedora CD using Kadischi

Kadischi was created in 2005 by Darko Ilic specifically for creating Fedora based Live CDs. Although it is still in active early development, it is still quite usable. What this means to the average user, is that there currently are not any RPMs for Kadischi; it is only downloadable from CVS. Fear not, this is covered below, and it’s quite easy to build.

Also, as Max Speveck pointed out in his Fedora Corner article in January, the Live CD is a major goal for Fedora 7. Perhaps Kadischi will be in RPM form by then…

Basic setup

This tutorial assumes that Fedora Core 6 is already installed on a system with a graphical interface. There needs to be a software repository of between 3 GB and 5 GB as well as a build directory of approximately 2 GB ( or 8 GB for a DVD build).

1. Install necessary utilities as root or using sudo

   [root@buildhost ~]$ yum install fedora busybox-anaconda syslinux
   mkisofs squashfs-tools zisofs-tools e2fsprogs createrepo yum-utils
   gnome-python2-extras cvs
   

2. Be sure you have the space available for the build directory (/LiveFC6 in this case)

   [root@buildhost ~]$ df -h /
   Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
   /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
                          48G  9.0G   36G  21% /
   

   In this case, there is plenty of room (36 GB) to place our build directory under “/”.

3. Create and populate your repo from the ISO images for Fedora Core 6. In this example the DVD ISO was used to save time by not having to continually mount and unmount the CD ISOs.

   [root@buildhost ~]$ mkdir /LiveFC6
   [root@buildhost ~]$ cp -av /media/FC6/Fedora/ /LiveFC6
   [root@buildhost ~]$ cp -av /media/FC6/repodata /LiveFC6
   

4. Checkout Kadischi from cvs

   [root@buildhost ~] $ cd /LiveFC6
   [root@buildhost ~] $ export CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@cvs.fedora.redhat.com:/cvs/devel
   [root@buildhost ~]$ cvs -z3 login
   [root@buildhost ~]$ cvs -z3 co kadischi
   

   Note: The “export” line above should be all on one line, not broken up.

5. Build and install Kadischi

   [root@buildhost ~] $ cd /LiveFC6/kadischi
   [root@buildhost ~] $ ./autogen.sh
   [root@buildhost ~] $ make
   [root@buildhost ~] $ make install
   

6. Configure Kadischi to use your preferred Live CD bootloader (GRUB and isolinux are the choices)

   [root@buildhost ~] $ vi /etc/kadischi/kadischi.conf
   ~snip~
   BOOTLOADER=isolinux
   

Build the live CD

The build process follows similar steps in building a system from CD. It uses anaconda to detect hardware, and the same dialogs are used to make selections like packages and localization.

Note: This process does not seem to work well in a VMware environment. It’s probably possible, but there is a fair amount of debugging to be done in order to get it working.

1. Start the process of configuring the Live CD

   [root@buildhost ~] $ kadischi /LiveFC6 /LiveFC6/Live-FC6.iso
   

   OR, if a kickstart file is available, use

   [root@buildhost ~] $ kadischi -C /LiveFC6 /LiveFC6/Live-FC6.iso --kickstart=/path/to/ks.cfg
   

   Note: The above command should be typed on one line.

2. If the non-Kickstart version was selected, follow the prompts to make localization, hostname, and package selection. When the process is complete, the installer will ask the user to “reboot”. This does not actually initiate a reboot, but it does send the process into the next step.
3. Next, a TUI will ask about firewall, services, and user configuration. It may take a few minutes to get from the end of the “reboot” phase to the “tui”. The ISO image will be created at this point.

   Note: The ISO image creation will definitely a while (20 minutes or so), so find something to do in the meantime.

4. The last step will prompt the user as to whether or not the new ISO is to be burned. Regardless of the answer, the new ISO image is in the directory specified at the beginning. In this example, /LiveFC6/Live-FC6.iso.
5. Boot the new ISO.

Additional resources

• Kadischi’s official web site
• Jon Benedict also reviewed Live Linux CDs: Building & customizing bootables, which covers building Fedora Live CDs (and others) in a more in depth fashion.

This entry was posted by The editorial team on Thursday, March 1st, 2007 at 12:33 pm and is filed under Fedora. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.