SDB:KIWI Cookbook Get Juiced

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Based on one of the KIWI supplied templates build a JeOS (Just enough OS) system to get familiar with the KIWI process.
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This procedure was tested on at least Kiwi version 3.25 ( kiwi --version ) - older version did not support all shown features Version



Get Juiced - our first recipe


Ups - what? Which Juice?

Juice is the pronunciation for JeOS, which stands for “Just Enough Operating System.” Wikipedia

The term JeOS refers to a customized operating system that precisely fits the needs of a particular application. This means a JeOS system includes only those pieces of an operating system required to support a particular application, resulting in a small system.

The benefits of using a JeOS based system compared to a general purpose OS are a smaller system footprint, improved efficiency and speed. Further, security is generally improved as well, the reduced number of software components in the system provide a smaller footprint for security vulnerabilities. These benefits make JeOS a perfect base for building appliances.

Juice

Juice (JeOS) recipe

Prep Time:

  • 1 min

Cook Time:

  • 10 - 12 min depending on bandwidth (see discussion above) and hardware of host

Ingredients:

  • a running openSUSE 11.1 system
  • a openSUSE 11.1 repository
  • installed recent release of the KIWI toolset (at least version 3.25)
  • installed kiwi-template package
  • about 1 GB free disk space


Templates

The kiwi-templates package provides example descriptions based on JeOS. The templates can be listed with the --list command line option.

kiwi --list

This will result in a list similar to the one shown below:

 suse-11.1-JeOS -> Version: 1.11.1       done
 suse-SLE10-JeOS -> Version: 1.10.1       done
 suse-SLE11-JeOS -> Version: 1.11.1       done

Using the --build option as discussed previously it is possible to create an image from a template as follows:

kiwi --build <templatename> --destdir <DestinationPath>


Changing the image type

By default the templates build a small text based VMware image. The created image supports file editing functionality and installation of additional packages using zypper. Therefore, this JeOS based system can easily be transformed into a full system using the predefined online repository. For this recipe we will use the openSUSE 11.1 template.

Rather than building the default VMware image lets build a LiveCD image. Therefore, we need to instruct Kiwi to create the LiveCD image using the command line option --type. This will override the default behavior. The iso value is accepted for the --type command line option to create a LiveCD image. Combining this with the usage described above results in the following command line form:

kiwi --build <templatename> --destdir <DestinationPath> --type iso

With this we can create the image as follows:

# mkdir /tmp/myjeos
# kiwi --build suse-11.1-JeOS --destdir /tmp/myjeos --type iso

Depending on your bandwidth this may take a while. Feel free to use a local repository as described in Repository Options in the Start Cooking recipe.


Congratulations! That's it - you have just created your first image with kiwi


You are now of course burning to know whether or not this actually worked and produced a usable system. You can test the iso image

# ls /tmp/myjeos/*.iso

using a full virtual system such as vmware or qemu. Another option for testing is to burn the .iso file to a CD or DVD and boot from it.

If we choose to use qemu to test the created image the following command line will do the trick.

# qemu -cdrom /tmp/myiso/suse-11.1-live-iso.i686-2.5.1.iso -m 512


The Login Details for the system are

  • User: root
  • pwd : linux


Here the complete list of the possible types to specify the output image to use:

  • ISO image - for Live CD/DVD Systems
  • USB image - for Live-Stick Systems
  • VMX image - for full virtualisation Systems
  • PXE image - for Thin Clients
  • OEM image - for Preloaded Systems
  • XEN image - for Paravirtual Systems
  • EC2 image - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Systems

Some caveats

  • Depending on the version of the template package you are using you may end up with a German keyboard map so be aware of what you type
  • For your reference, here is a picture of the German layout
  • You can change the keyboard map after you login as follows (using US map as example).
# loadkeys /usr/share/kbd/keymaps/i386/qwerty/us.kmap.gz