Starterkits/builder

Intro
A part of ALT Linux Starterkits project aiming to help getting started with ALT Linux build tools without having to install the system and configure user environment (or to allow use of temporarily available hardware for builds).

Download
ISO: i586, x86_64; see also the Starterkits page.

Contents
This is a LiveCD which doesn't touch local drives while booting and contains these components:
 * hasher has been created to reproducibly build packages in isolated environment;
 * gear is a tool to store sources in a git repository and extract the version to be built;
 * mkimage is a set of utilities made to build images (mostly ISO ones);
 * mkimage-profiles are a metaprofile with quite a few image building blocks and configurations (documented in Russian).

Examples
This command clones the repo from git.alt caching archive and tries to build a package (note that this happens in a chroot so build results are to be found within ):

git clone git://git.altlinux.org/gears/h/hello.git && cd hello && gear-hsh

And this one tries to build a tiny test image (replace syslinux.iso make target with help/distro to see complete list):

make -C /usr/share/mkimage-profiles syslinux.iso

See also the preset shell history.

One can copy the results by means of / or having mounted a local/network file system as these will become unavailable after reboot since it's tmpfs!

Prerequisites
These hybrid image should boot off a flash drive or CD on any x86 host or virtual machine with BIOS or UEFI; it's reasonable to provide at least a gigabyte of RAM (4+ is better) as part of it will be used for tmpfs mounted in.

Run and  if local swap is desired; this will add the pre-existing swap partition and reconfigure  size appropriately.

An Ethernet interface with DHCP and access to http://ftp.altlinux.org is desirable.

Feedback
You're welcome to subscribe to our mailing list to discuss anything related to these images.

Starterkits/builder