Hi Vojtech,
I don't have an answer for your questions, so I have copied the
Release Engineering team who can give you the answers you need. I love
this spin idea, and am happy to help in whatever way I can.
Thanks,
BC
On Tue, Feb 4, 2020 at 11:59 AM Vojtech Polasek <vpolasek(a)redhat.com> wrote:
>
> Hello Ben,
>
> my name is Vojta and I am a blind software engineer working for RH in
> Brno, Czech Republic. I am working in platform security, but this is not
> that important for this mail.
>
> Me and several other friends from RH are working on a special Linux
> distribution for blind and visually impaired users. This distribution is
> currently based on Fedora. We would like to make a spin from it. But I
> have a special question, see below.
>
> I know that if I apply for a spin, the lab infrastructure can create ISO
> live images from kickstarts. That is nice. But...
>
> While demonstrating our distro to potential users, we chose a bit
> different way than others. Instead of live images shipped on USB drives,
> we chose to create a full installation of the system and place it on the
> USB drive. This has several benefits compared to live images:
>
> - changes made by users are persistent and not limited to 4 Gb
>
> - it is possible to partition the USB drive and create an additional
> partition formatted as Exfat for transfering data between Linux and
> non-Linux world
>
> - users can come to whatever computer and boot the system with their
> personal configuration, data, software...
>
> - users can have almost the same experience as if the system was
> installed on their primary hard drive
>
> It can have its drawbacks but we used this approach already two times
> while presenting our "spin" on special workshops and we think it worked
> very well.
>
> I am not against live images and if we create a Fedora spin, we will
> definitely offer them as well. But I believe the described alternative
> approach has its benefits-
>
> The whole process is described here:
>
>
https://github.com/vojtapolasek/Fegora
>
> Currently we use a VM to perform an automated kickstart installation and
> then we transfer the raw image on an USB drive.
>
> My question now is: could the infrastructure used for production of
> Fedora spins be used to create not only live images but also our custom
> raw disk images? If not, could we at least use those resources to store
> such images?
We can achieve that easily, it's the same process we use for the
aarch64/iot/cloud images. I suspect it would need a FESCo exception
for the change but from an infra PoV it works now.