USpin

Universal image creation utilities. Used to produce bootable Linux medium in an agnostic fashion. This is still a Work In Progress.

USpin is a Solus project.

Note Solus, USpin, and the Solus Project Team, are not endorsed by any projects listed here in terms of planned support. We are simply creating a tool to simplify management and creation of various images all from one place. As developers may experiment with, be involved in, or test other projects and distros for many reasons (including validation of projects we develop such as Budgie) - it is useful even to us to be able to produce medium for other distros using a single standardized tool.

Obviously the core benefit to us is in producing our own medium, however others are welcome to join in and contribute too, because there are a great many tools for creating distro images, each one more specialised than the last. It also serves somewhat as a research project, in seeing "how others do" to find ways in which Solus can improve itself too. The more specialised the support for Solus in the tool in contrast to other distros will highlight to us exactly what we can and should improve.

Rationale

Intended to succeed the existing solus-image-creator.py script with something a bit more robust that can construct multiple image types.

Currently the existing image creator can only construct a simple ISO9660 image, however Solus also makes use of chrootable base images for the overlayfs system employed in evobuild.

Planned support

Those with a fire symbol (🔥) are currently considered important to Solus projects and are the active priority. After stabilisation we can work on the support for other medium, and at that point will happily take contributions (post v1)

Medium

• LiveOS (dracut distros) 🔥
• raw filesystem type (partitions in disk image) 🔥
• flat image support (no partitions, i.e. an ext4 loopback image) 🔥
• casper (Ubuntu)
• debian-live (Vanilla Debian images)

Boot:

• isolinux/syslinux 🔥
• systemd-class bootloaders 🔥
• grub "2"

Package Management:

• eopkg (done) 🔥
• sol (for validation in Solus)
• yum
• dnf
• swupd
• .deb (dpkg/apt-get/apt) (via debootstrap maybe?)

TODO

• Add parser for the Solus image specification format
• Port the Stack implementation from old image creator
• Add config format for the main image configuration
• Add utilities for image format & creation (dd/fallocate, etc)
• Implement full eopkg support in generic pkg.Manager interface
• Add basic ISO9660 support once again
• Add complete Legacy Boot bootloader support for isolinux
• Remove repo definition from .packages and place in .spin, similar to solbuild.
• Enhance bootloader support for UEFI
• Build (successfully!) an existing Solus image specification
• Construct specifications for our chroot builder images
• Add support for VM/Container images

Supported Medium Types (WIP)

LiveOS

A LiveOS image is an ISO9660 image containing a live operating system. This is the dracut LiveOS image type, currently used by Solus, Fedora, available in Gentoo and potentially others.

By default a hybrid ISO is created, that is an El Torito bootable image that may be booted in either an optical drive or on removal media such as a USB thumb drive. This image will use (currently) isolinux for the bootloader. As the project is further implemented, support will be added for UEFI booting too.

License

Copyright © 2016 Solus Project

USpin is available under the terms of the Apache-2.0 license