[Thincrust-devel] Installing options

[Glen Gray]

Hey Guys,

I'm looking at creating an image using the appliance-tools for use on a Set Top Box for a project I have at work. We've currently got a system of scripts that manages a lot of this stuff for us, but they're dated and I wanted to try and move to as many upstream tools as possible.

With that in mind I'm experimenting with appliance-creator and some kickstarts. Based on some tips I've found on the web, I've managed to create an install that's down to 230Mb. This is just a basic install as from the fedora-aos.ks but with --instLangs set on the %packages and also a %post script that rebuilds the locale-archive.

I like what I see so far, but the next piece of the puzzle is where I'm falling down. I need some method of distributing that image via USB so that it can be installed on the target hardware. 

Anyone got any suggestions to share on how they've solved this issue ?

To my mind, i'm looking for a livecd that'll install the appliance-creator generated raw image via anaconda and kickstart. That's probably not a million miles away from what anaconda and the liveinst setup are doing, but it's using the live image as the basis for the install, not some other image on the media.

What I'm thinking of now is making a minimal live cd, based off the fedora-live-base.ks perhaps, that has a %post section, which will create an /etc/init.d/livesys type script which will attempt to pull the raw image from the host key's / dir and dd it to the machines drive. Is that a sane idea or am I too tired and not seeing something obvious. I'm already starting to that that won't be as flexible as I'd like. 

--
Glen Gray
<slaine at slaine.org>