[OpenIndiana-discuss] How to remaster the OpenIndiana's usb/iso image?

[Hung Nguyen Gia]

My friend has a very powerful computer with 32 cores (including hyper threading) and 64 GB of RAM. My computer only has 4 cores and 8 GB of RAM. He rarely uses it, though. Most of the time he's outside to filming. He only uses it a bit on weekend to do the rendering job. I'm allowed to use this computer. The only requirement is I'm not allowed to touch the hard disk.

So I workaround this by using Live USB Stick. They could serve the same role as an installed system. First, I use MX Snapshot to dump the MX Linux I'm using on my computer to an ISO image then I use MX Live USB Maker to create the Live USB Stick. This live system already has everything I needed, all of the applications and my settings are there. VirtualBox even usable in this form. I attach an external SSD and use it to store my VM images. The live system doesn't need to be fast, so an USB stick is enough, but the VM images need to be on a fast device to help performance. With this setup, I used VirtualBox to setup OpenIndiana VM to build Pale Moon from source myself so I always have the latest version of it and I even have resources left to tinkering with another OI VM and watching youtube's 4K videos in the mean while on the MX Linux host. Building Pale Moon on my own machine is very slow but it's blazing fast on this system.

Almost forgot, for some unknown reasons, maybe because of a buggy UEFI firmware, the external SSD is unable to boot. Only USB sticks are allowed to boot.

Yes, my setup is a bit weirded. Maybe it doesn't fit with OI at all. But I really hope someday I could use OI in place of MX Linux for this job.

---- On Sat, 09 Jan 2021 19:48:49 +0700 Till Wegmueller <toasterson at gmail.com> wrote ----

 > We use distro constructor to build our images. But It's definitely not 
 > easy to use. 
 >  
 > BTW what do you want to accomplish? It sounds like that you try to make 
 > OI confine to a workflow that you are used to which does not exist here. 
 > Have you tried using exising workflows from OI first to get yourself 
 > familiar? 
 >  
 > Do you need a system to compile things and throw awaY? Have a look into 
 > zones and vagrant. We even have scripts in oi-userland to use zones for 
 > clean builds. And officially supported vagrant images. including a 
 > vagrantfile in oi-userland so you can just type "vagrant up" in the repo 
 > root and it gets you a complete environment to compile and package 
 > software. No need to reinvent the wheel here. 
 >  
 > -Till 
 >  
 > On 09.01.21 08:03, Hung Nguyen Gia via openindiana-discuss wrote: 
 > > On MX Linux, we have the technology to doing so. It's very straight forward using graphical tools. 
 > > 
 > > Let me describe what I wanted to do. For example, the OI live system doesn't have the compiler tool chain installed. I want to make a usb/iso image of OI with the build-essential package installed. How could I do it? 
 > > 
 > > I imagined the procedure could be: 
 > > 
 > > Install OI into disk. Update the system and install the build-essential package. Then using rsync to sync the running system into a directory. Extract the OI usb/iso image. After that, using lofiadm to make a .zlib image of that directory to replace the .zlib image on the OI usb/iso image. Then using appropriate tools to rebuild the OI usb/iso image. 
 > > 
 > > Would that work? Thanks. 
 > > 
 > > p/s: It's much better if OI has the graphical tools to help doing it like MX Linux does, though. 
 > > 
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