SDB:KIWI-LTSP building custom image
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Building custom LTSP image
Default kiwi-ltsp-prebuilt and kiwi-ltsp-bootimages should work for most use cases, however you may want to customize it by adding some application missing or change some local configuration not possible by other means, this is how you can build your own LTSP image.
Procedure
Download the latest i686 DVD iso image and mount it at the following location
mkdir /mnt/12.3 mount /path/to/openSUSE-12.3-DVD-i586.iso /mnt/12.3
Alternatively if you have fast internet connection then use that as installation source. Make the changes in /etc/sysconfig/kiwi-ltsp specifying which source to use:
suse_1230_INSTALL_SOURCE="http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/12.3/repo/oss/"
Customizing system image
If you want to add any application to run as localapps add the the space separated list of package names in /etc/sysconfig/kiwi-ltsp as below and run kiwi-ltsp-setup -l to rebuild the image:
LTSP_LOCALAPPS="kde4-kopete"
This will install kopete that can be run as local application from the client.
If you have RPM files with all dependencies and know that it does not require anything more you can do this short way of installing packages:
kiwi-ltsp-setup -l1 rpm -Uvh --nodeps --force --root=/srv/kiwi-ltsp-nfs-i386 *.rpm kiwi-ltsp-setup -l2
Next time only step 2 and 3 are required to add more packages.
Be warned that adding more applications in client chroot may degrade the performance.
To tweak configurations inside the system image, you can chroot to /srv/kiwi-ltsp-nfs-i386 and make necessary changes after running kiwi-ltsp-setup -l1, once done with the changes build the image by running kiwi-ltsp-setup -l2
Customizing netboot image
Default kiwi-ltsp-bootimages contains commonly used drivers, if any driver or the firmware is missing you can build image to suit your requirements.
Edit /usr/share/kiwi/image/netboot/kiwi-ltsp-suse-12.3/config.xml add the missing driver under type="drivers" profiles="diskless" section.
The initrd is stripped of many files to keep the size small, /usr/share/kiwi/image/netboot/kiwi-ltsp-suse-12.3/images.sh is used to make many automated customization to the initrd, use that to check if it has removed any feature that you need or to do your own customizations.