Fedora Remix

Purpose

This repository contains the build scripts for a Fedora Remix that aims to offer a complete GNU/Linux desktop, fully ready for real-life home/development/office usage, minimizing the post installation phase that is still difficult or error prone on most distros.

We have taken care of:

• multimedia support
• font configurations
• tools and software selection
• little desktop tweaks
• Active Directory integration

It's quite easy to toggle features by including or excluding "mixin" files.

You can build a LiveCD and try the software, and then install it in your PC if you want.

Why Fedora?

Fedora is a feature-rich operating system which offers a complete suite of sofware for many purposes. It is flexible enough to get a custom version by using the installer (see here for more details). The build process can be described through Kickstart files and can be modified to get new variants.

Official kickstarts

You can get the official Fedora kickstarts from: https://pagure.io/fedora-kickstarts

How to build the LiveCD

A Fedora system matching the target release version is required to build the images. The build system support using a podman container, so that another Linux host can be used.

Required dependencies are: podman, qemu-kvm, make. You will need root privileges for most things.

This usually means:

# dnf install podman qemu-kvm make

To build, selinux must be set off. This means either disabling at runtime:

# setenforce 0

Or it might require to (since Fedora 34+) adding a kernel option:

enforcing=0

GNU make is used to control the build process. For example:

Prepare the podman image used to build:

# make podman-builder

Start clean:

# make clean

Build the ISO files:

# make

Test the live system in a virtual machine:

# make test

Write the result to a USB drive:

# make DEVICE=/dev/sdX disk-efi # or "disk-bios" for legacy BIOS mode

Clean up the build machine completely:

# make clean podman-clean

By default podman is used to run the build steps but the make target can also be run directly:

# make USE_PODMAN=no images

Customizing the build

By editing remix-*.ks individual customizations can be excluded, localization can be changed. By default everything is included.

We are happy to accept PRs for additional languages and extra features.

Post install tasks

firstboot script

After completing an installation a firstboot command can be executed to apply a few customizations and cleanups that cannot be built into the installer.

# firstboot

This will enable noatime mounts, remove Anaconda and enable flathub.

Joining an Active Directory domain

You can join a newly installed host to the domain using the following command:

# domainctl join

You will be prompted for credential of an administrator.

Assinging the workstation

You can assign the worksation to an user using the following command:

# domainctl assign

You will be prompted for a domain username.

Useful manual build commands

See a detailed description of how to build the live media.

To run these, you will also need:

# dnf install lorax-lmc-novirt vim-minimal pykickstart livecd-tools

In a nutshell, you have to create a single Kickstart file from the base code:

# ksflatten --config kickstarts/remix-gnome.ks --output fedora-kickstarts.ks

Then you can build the ISO image using the kickstart just obtained:

# livemedia-creator --resultdir=results/remix-gnome --make-iso --no-virt \
   --project=Fedora --releasever=31 --ks=fedora-kickstarts.ks

You can create a bootable USB/SD device (legacy BIOS) using the iso image:

# livecd-iso-to-disk --format --reset-mbr --msdos result/images/boot.iso /dev/sdX

In order to get an EFI bootable media:

# cp result/images/boot.iso boot-efi.iso
# cat result/images/efiboot.img >> boot-efi.iso
# livecd-iso-to-disk --format --reset-mbr --efi boot-efi.iso /dev/sdX

Change Log

All notable changes to this project will be documented in the CHANGELOG.md file.

The format is based on Keep a Changelog.