Installed Fedora-Scientific 17. Checked out Scilab. Demos impressive. #scilab #fedora. Thanks Scilab packagers! twitter.com/echorand/statu…

— Amit Saha (@echorand) May 25, 2012

To state the obvious,  If you are not a KDE person, you may go ahead and install GNOME3, XFCE, LXDE witth yum, like so:

# yum group install “GNOME Desktop Environment”

# yum group install xfce

# yum group install lxde

Feel free to join us on SciTech SIG.

Support for building Live images: I attempted to use livemedia-creator (which is going to be THE tool from F18+), but unfortunately ran into issues which prevented me from building images. So for now, I have implemented this feature using ‘livecd-creator’. The Kickstart file (flattened) needs to be specified and other details such as architecture, any extra packages to be pulled from Koji, etc. The specifications are specified via the config/live.conf file.

The User specifications are now completely via .conf files: Myrationale behind that in the first place was that since this code is really going to serve as the ‘backend’, command line arguments could be done away with. But, even if we want to use this as standalone, specifying .conf files is fine as well. (We will see what happens with this after discussing with my mentors). Here is a brief description of the config files in config/

• imagebuild.conf: type of image, architecture, staging area (to be explained later) and email (for notification)
• boot.conf: configuration for boot.iso images
• repoinfo.conf: repository configuration required for the above
• pungi.conf: configuration for DVD images
• live.conf: configuration for live images

The kickstart files if needed are to be placed in the kickstarts/ sub-directory. To use it, you will need to ‘cd’ into ‘image_builder’ directory and run ‘$python run_imagebuild.py’ after setting up the appropriate config files in image_builder/config and kickstart files in kickstarts/
if any.

Support for copying images: I have also now enabled support for copying the images to a ‘staging area’ as mentioned earlier. I assume a passwordless login setup and hence do a ‘scp’ once the desired image has been created. This is how you would use it standalone.

Now, as a first step towards being able to distribute build jobs to different node, I have also now added simple support for carrying out the build process on a different host. This is done by the file
delegate.py.

Here is what it does:

• Assumes that the config/ and kickstart/ files have been correctly setup by the web-form handler or manually.
• Then copies these files to the image_builder/ directory
• It creates a .tar archive of the image_builder
• Then it reads the appropriate node (architecture) from the nodes.conf file and also retrieves the working location specified.
• The .tar file is then ‘scp’-ed to the appropriate location specified
• Then runs the run_imagebuild.py script on the build node by ‘SSHing’
• The image is then automatically transferred to the staging area
  specified as earlier.

To try this feature, simply setup nodes.conf file correctly and the config/ and kickstarts/ in data/ and run $sudo python delegate.py

Note that the specified nodes should have all the dependencies installed, such as lorax, koji (setup correctly), pykickstart and livecd-creator.

[1] https://github.com/amitsaha/gsoc2012_fbs

As you can see (on opening the screenshot), there is missing header error from ‘/var/www/html/owncloud/apps/files_odfviewer/appinfo/app.php’. This post here told me that it could be due to a empty line. So that;s it. I went to the file and removed the line no. 8 which was an empty line! And it works fine.

Couple of days back, I added the support for creating a DVD iso (using ‘pungi’). Basically the code requires a pungi.conf file to be specified. For example, here is a sample pungi.conf:


[DEFAULT]
name=Fedora
ver=17
arch=i686
flavor=Desktop
destdir=/tmp/pungi_op
cachedir=/var/cache/pungi
bugurl=http://bugzilla.redhat.com
nosource=1
sourceisos=0
force=1
stage=all
config=fedora-install-fedora.ks

#Specify a working directory
workdir=/tmp/pungi_work
# specify packages via NVR
nvr=
# specify packages via Build IDs (separated by a semicolon)
bid=314456


If you are familiar with pungi, you will notice the resemblance of the configuration options with the pungi command line options. The code basically reads this configuration file and fires pungi appropriately.

As you can see, the last two options allow you to specify more recent builds of packages (via NVR and Build IDs) which are not yet available in any of the release repositories and include them instead of the less recent ones. Since pungi requires a kickstart file to be specified, I update the kickstart file by adding the side repository URL to the list of repositories specified (script here at [1]). (I have hit a problem with this step: https://www.redhat.com/archives/kickstart-list/2012-May/msg00002.html)

The updated code is now in the git repository [2] and a sample command line to build a DVD iso would be: python imagebuild.py -t dvd -a i686 (after you have created the appropriate pungi.conf file). You can also use the run_imagebuild shell script for the same.

[1] https://github.com/amitsaha/gsoc2012_fbs/blob/master/scripts/ks_addrepo.py
[2] https://github.com/amitsaha/gsoc2012_fbs/tree/master/image_builder

Thoughts:

I am beginning to think of modifying the earlier boot.iso code to read in a configuration file instead of command line arguments, like I have done for the DVD iso. This is keeping in mind the fact this code will really be the backend of the web-based build service. Hence, .conf files created at the web based frontend and sent to this image builder code would be a good way to go about it, me thinks. No? We will see.

Next up will be support for creating Live media.

This command line spawns the build process of a Fedora 17 boot.iso with a number of extra packages (specified via their NVR or build IDs):

$ sudo python imagebuild.py -t boot -a i386 -o image_op1 -w image_work -p fedora -r 17 -v 1 -nvr 'anaconda-17.26-1.fc17' -bid '318281' '311809'

downloading packages
( 1/592) [100%] downloading GConf2-3.2.5-1.fc17.i686.rpm
( 2/592) [100%] downloading ModemManager-0.5.2.0-1.fc17.i686.rpm
( 3/592) [100%] downloading NetworkManager-0.9.4.0-7.git20120403.fc17.i686.rpm
( 4/592) [100%] downloading NetworkManager-glib-0.9.4.0-7.git20120403.fc17....
( 4/592) [100%] downloading NetworkManager-glib-0.9.4.0-7.git20120403.fc17....
.
.


Finally, a boot.iso is created. Next, I plan to inegrate package retrieval from Koji via other methods. And then, support for creating Live images and DVD images. And then, the REST API/Web based service.

Some of the scripts I was experimenting with to pull packages are here [2].

[1] https://github.com/amitsaha/gsoc2012_fbs/tree/master/image_builder
[2] https://github.com/amitsaha/gsoc2012_fbs/tree/master/scripts

1. lorax
2. pungi
3. livemedia-creator

Having had a basic idea of how lorax works,  I then proceeded to use pylorax to create a boot.iso by building upon Tim Flink’s image building code he had sent me during our project discussions. A build is now in progress as I write this.

My next plan is to integrate the creation of the side repository from extra packages retrieved from Koji so that newer builds of packages are included in the boot.iso.

Also, start using configuration files for specifying the repository/mirror information, architecture, release, etc. By next week, I should have this code in my git hub.

• Android Programming with App Inventor, published in the May 2012 issue of Linux Journal. Checkout AppInventor here.
• Parallel Programming in C and Python, published in the May 2012 issue of Linux Journal. In this article I provide a how-to style introduction to working with OpenMP, Python’s multiprocessing module and PiCloud.
• BoxGrinder: Virtual Appliance Manufactory, published in the May 2012 issue of Linux Magazine. BoxGrinder is an easy way to create Virtual Appliances. I have discussed it in some of my earlier blog posts. (Parallel Computing Appliance, ownCloud appliance)
• PiCloud: An Easy way to the cloud , in March, 2012 issue of Linux For You. The article is now available online here

All my writings are listed here.

Once I setup Koji, I started playing around with the client code that Tim Flink had sent me earlier. I adopted Tim’s code to create a script to download RPM’s from Koji and create a side repository with them. The Python code is called: dl_package.py.

Next, I wanted to have a script which would download the latest build of a package for a particular tag from Koji. For this, I used koji_utils.py from Autoqa‘s code. The code is called: dl_latest_build.py. As of now, this script just downloads the RPMs for each of the tags.

Both these scripts are available here: https://github.com/amitsaha/gsoc2012_fbs/tree/master/scripts

Here’s the abstract:

On-Demand build service seeks to build Live and installation images for developers, testers and consumers of Fedora Linux. During the testing of Fedora releases, test images are often useful as smoke tests before full TC/RC composes, as baselines for specific test days or for automated installation testing in AutoQA. The idea is to make an on-demand Web-based build service which users/developers can use to make custom Fedora based distributions so that command-line wrangling can be minimized.

More details is available here. I shall be blogging more about my progress here. Many thanks to my mentor Tim Flink for his support during the application.

Congratulations to all the other projects accepted as part of the Fedora project.

Vines (getvines.org/docs/) looks interesting. And so does EventMachine (github.com/eventmachine/e…) #ruby #programming

— Amit Saha (@echorand) April 15, 2012

Did you check out: mosh (mosh.mit.edu/#getting) yet? Try it to believe it! #linux #ssh

— Amit Saha (@echorand) April 13, 2012

Hello Julia! (github.com/JuliaLang/julia). Install works perfectly on Fedora 16. #fedora twitter.com/echorand/statu…

— Amit Saha (@echorand) April 12, 2012

I Like Shutter (shutter-project.org). Screen shot tool for Linux. #linux #shutter

— Amit Saha (@echorand) April 9, 2012

While you are at Sinatra (sinatrarb.com/intro.html), check out DENIED: denied.immersedcode.org #microframeworks #web #python #ruby

— Amit Saha (@echorand) March 26, 2012

Hey @PageKite, have you looked at progrium.com/localtunnel/ ? I haven’t played with it at all. Just thought you guys might be interested.

— Amit Saha (@echorand) March 24, 2012

Go check them out!