eight-livecd (RHEL8 Beta livecd)

Using lorax on el8 to create livemedia.

Motivation

I am using RHEL and derivatives (CentOS) pretty much everywhere at work and at home.

Building from the beta a livecd allows me to test quickly if my hardware is supported. It lowers the cycle of testing hardware and to be able to report bugs to Red Hat.

The good news : all tools needed are now part of RHEL8 Beta repositories.

As RHEL8 is heavly based on Fedora 28, I reused the kickstart provided by lorax in /usr/share/doc/lorax/. A simple diff will show you what I updated/changed.

Status (WIP)

Version	kickstart name	Status ISO	Status PXE
minimal	el8-livemedia-minimal.ks	OK	OK
workstation	el8-livemedia.ks	FAIL	FAIL

Perequisites

RHEL8 Beta installation and a license
~ 10GB free space
yum install lorax
SElinux disabled setenforce 0

Usage

Warning: using --novirt could crash your local install (from lorax documentationIt may totally trash your host. So far I haven’t had this happen, but the possibility exists that a bug in Anaconda could result in it operating on real devices. I recommend running it in a virt or on a system that you can afford to lose all data from.)

As soon as mock will be available for el8 I will update this documentation.

Now let's start:

Clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/alphacc/eight-livecd
cd eight-livecd

Run as root livemedia-creator to create an ISO:

livemedia-creator --ks ks/el8-livemedia-minimal.ks --no-virt --resultdir  media/el8 --project RHEL-8-beta-live --make-iso --iso-only --iso-name RHEL-8-beta-live-x86_64.iso --releasever 8 --volid RHEL-8-beta-live --title RHEL-beta-live --macboot

Alternatively, to create PXE files:

livemedia-creator --ks ks/el8-livemedia-minimal.ks --no-virt --resultdir  media/el8 --project RHEL-8-beta-live --make-pxe-live --releasever 8 --volid RHEL-8-beta-live --title RHEL-beta-live

Debugging

lorax stores log in the current directory:

livemedia.log
program.log

Anaconda stores debugging info in /tmp and lorax copies it in ./anaconda in your current directory:

dbus.log
ifcfg.log
storage.log
anaconda.log
hawkey.log
program.log
packaging.log
dnf.cache
dnf.librepo.log

When used with livemedia-creator, yum 4 aka dnf stores his cache in /dnf.package.cache.

Common issues

Check if selinux is disabled setenforce 0 :-)
2018-11-18 15:34:45,635: Unable to init server: Could not connect: Connection refused: check if the packages in your kickstart exist in RHEL8 (anaconda.log will give you more details).
Problem zeroing free blocks of disk_img: check if your loop devices are ok, after few runs I saw some umounts failing. umount -f helped. However I had to reboot the VM once.

Contributing

Please send a PR if you find bugs and/or improvement.

alphacc / eight-livecd

readme