How to build Sway ISO

How to

This is a guide how you can easily build the Sway Live iso from this repository. Follow the steps below and everything should went well.

Setup

Two packages are required to build the ISO.

• pykickstart
  • ksflatten tool is required to merge %includes in the kickstart file
• lorax-lmc-virt
  • The livemedia-creator tool to run the machinery

RPM based system

You need to have pykickstart and lorax-lmc-virt in your system.

sudo dnf install -y pykickstart lorax-lmc-virt

OSTree base system

You need this packages too but you can use podman to avoid layering. However the LMC tool requires loop devices pre-created before the container creation. So we need to prepare them before creating the container (the container then remembers them even between reboots of the host and can freely work with them).

To create the loop devices:

sudo mknod -m 0660 /dev/loop0 b 7 0
sudo mknod -m 0660 /dev/loop1 b 7 1

And then create the container by this call in the base of this repository:

sudo podman run -ti --privileged --name=lorax \
                --tmpfs /var/tmp:rw,mode=1777 \
                -w /work \
                -v $PWD:/work:z \
                fedora:37

In the container install the packages mentioned above:

dnf install -y pykickstart lorax-lmc-virt

You are all done. For future ISO builds you can just run sudo podman start --attach lorax.

Get the ISO for building

The lorax-lmc-virt will build the ISO by running Anaconda in the VM with the given kickstart file. For that to happen you need to have an ISO with the Anaconda. Any installation boot.iso (net install) will work here but you need ISO from the given release.

First create a build directory:

mkdir build

Then download the ISO (change the fedora version based on what you want to build):

curl -L https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/development/37/Everything/x86_64/iso/Fedora-Everything-netinst-x86_64-37-20220816.n.0.iso -o ./build/f37-boot.iso

Build the Live ISO

Follow the guide here to build the container. For OSTree based systems run these inside of the container created above.

Add our repositories

You need to add our copr repository and device if you want to build Rawhide or not. The easiest way is to change fedora-repo.ks. Comment/uncomment lines to include rawhide or non-rawhide version and add:

url --url=https://download.copr.fedorainfracloud.org/results/@sway-sig/sway-spin-dev/fedora-$releasever-$basearch/

to the file.

Merge kickstart files

Use the ksflatten tool for this:

ksflatten -c ./fedora-live-sway.ks -o ./build/out.ks

The fedora-live-sway.ks kickstart file is the leaf of the includes. This command will generate out.ks having everything in one file.

Build!

To start the build run:

cd build
livemedia-creator --ks=./out.ks \
                  --project=Fedora-Sway-Live \
                  --make-iso \
                  --volid=Fedora-Sway-Live-37 \
                  --iso-only \
                  --iso=./f37-boot.iso \
                  --releasever=37 \
                  --macboot \
                  --resultdir ./result

The build is harder to follow but just give it a time and in case of failure the installation output is in ./build/virt-install.log.

Happy Live ISO building.