Alright everyone, thanks to the folks at Fyra Labs we are now pretty close to fixing one of the worst parts of our experience, installation! If you’ve heard of Ultramarine Linux then this is made by the same people. So basically a sister project in this Fedoraverse.
Readymade (don’t forget to star the repo!) will be the installer that we will be using for the forseeable future.
Rationale
We purposely didn’t want to make an installer so when we found out that Fyra was working on a bootc back end to Readymade it made sense since we’ve also spent a ton of time with that team at SCaLE.
Fyra is working diligently on good bootc support and that’s important to us.
Excellent flatpak support in the installer.
Considerably smaller ISOs, we’re now about the same size as an Ubuntu ISO.
Live session means that GNOME/KDE’s software keyboards will work during installation, especially awesome for handhelds and touch devices
Essentially wraps existing tools like bootc install and systemd-repart
We need some other things for better KDE support so for now this is Bluefin only but we expect to enable KDE based images here pretty soon. This also means that they are Live ISOs out of the box, so you can test hardware ahead of time to ensure everything works before committing to Bluefin!
We’ve done a few rounds in VMs but need help in the following areas, especially on bare metal:
Nvidia support - we need to test acceleration in both the live session and the installation.
Secure boot - we still haven’t tested secure boot on the metal and need your help here.
Known Issues
Please browse the known issues list, and if you have anything new to report, please report it! You can also add information to existing issues.
There’s some obvious ones, we don’t have the logos in place and it’s sending you to the Ultramarine docs when you click on stuff, we’ll be working on that and hope to be ready here pretty soon.
We’re hoping to turn on the GTS downloads on the website this week and refresh the torrents as well, thanks for helping out!
Hanging out with Fyra
The Fyra folks are here if you wanna ask them questions:
Actually that’d be a useful thing someone could do, recording a video would help but we’re kind of heads down, maybe someone in here could find the time?
titanoboa generates the live image, which inturn includes the readymade installer, which is an application (rust/helium I think?), which has a bootc backend which basically wraps bootc install. We just need to blast the disk so our use case is very straightforward.
And the crucial bit we were missing, we can now include flatpaks on the ISO, which means that once we’re done anyone with a custom image can have their package list, and then their flatpak list, and then boom, autogenerated ISOs for everyone. And since our actions include rclone, you can push those ISOs anywhere you want since it supports just about everything.
I tried to deploy the new Bluefin ISOs on both all AMD and Intel + Nvidia PC’s I have, and both systems failed with the same error. Secure boot enabled/disabled did not make any difference.
Please find attached screenshot of the errors I got on both systems.
I think that the /dev/disk/by-label/bluefin_boot issue is corruption on when flashing the ISO somehow, it should work fine like a VM, even on real hardware and everything
Okay, I did some testing on the live system, and both my Intel A380 that drives my displays, and my Nvidia RTX A4500 that does CUDA work, worked.
I ran my own CUDA tests, as well as GeekBench GPU tests (Intel, Nvidia), and everything worked as it should.
I was not able to install, and created an issue on the readymade github.
Finally, some feedback (sorry for the line patterns, that’s a moire ) :
Serial numbers on drives would be really helpful if you have more than one of a vendor/model number:
Does it also not work on installed Bluefin? The Live environment should be like 99.9% the same as the installed system, so maybe this is a Bluefin bug?
that’s a moire 
