Enjoy. This was just me playing around. I think somebody tried to do this in the past and abandoned it. As of today, it builds, and you can log in. Brew and distrobox work. I’ve not tried installing it on bare metal, only VM.
And of course there is NO installer, you need to use podman to create your disk image.
Note that I will be tweaking and fixing things so pay attention if the actions are breaking. That’s just me.
This is fantastic, and I’ll likely play around with it soon. I have a laptop with only 8GB RAM that would likely do better with Cinnamon than KDE, so I might clone your repo and try it out there.
I’ve also been considering doing something similar for the Fedora Cosmic spin using Blue Build, and it sounds like you’ve done a lot of hard work that I could re-use.
Great! I also have an xfce version cooking as well.
FYI I have a branch on the cinnamon repo where I’m adding uupd so we get universal blue updates with brew and system.
It’s not merged yet until I can test it tomorrow. Then I’ll merge it there and in the xfce repo (just got done done building so need to boot it up and check)
Now I don’t have all the nice just stuff Aurora and Bluefin has (in either) It’s basic compared to that, but it’s functional and it’s definitely usable.
That’s fine, since the laptop I’m thinking of trying this on doesn’t need a lot, though Homebrew and Distrobox would still be useful for occasional light work.
The Xfce version would be interesting, too, and I’ll try that in a VM sometime. I haven’t used Xfce in ages, but have used Cinnamon a lot in recent years and find it very usable. I’ll be interested to see what Xfce looks like these days.
By the way, I looked at your repo and am thinking about how I could use your recipe alongside the ones I have in my own BlueBuild repo for Aurora and uCore. It looks like all I’d need to do is more your files/system directory into a subdirectory and update the recipe accordingly.
This also reminds me of an idea I’ve had for a better way to combine different Blue Build “ingredients” and re-share work. Something like how you can split recipes into multiple files, but with the ability to pull those files from elsewhere. Could be done via Git with versioning (so you can pin versions that are known to be good/safe), with a simple spec with info like where extra files should live. This could help with a lot of things, like the way I install Bitwarden and NordVPN in my own BlueBuild repo, and how you’re setting up Cinnamon+LightDM. This would be simpler than custom Blue Build modules since you’d be sharing/re-using recipe YAML rather than writing scripts.
That sounds VERY interesting. I could see how that could be useful.
The uupd merge is successful, so now updates are done via that for brew, flatpaks, and system updates. I also had to add Dependabot so we get PRs from Bluebuild and GitHub when things are updated. I think it’s pretty stable; I don’t see much else I need. Right now the build on GitHub is set to update once a week.
The ONLY weird oddity I ran into has to do with flatpaks added via Bluebuild and the menus on Cinnamon. After adding them, I noticed they were not in the menu system, but when I logged out and back in, they were there.
I fixed the issue by adjusting boot/login ordering so the one-time system Flatpak setup finishes before the graphical session starts: previously, LightDM/Cinnamon could come up while Flatpaks were still being installed/registered, which meant desktop entries sometimes didn’t appear until a logout/login cycle; now LightDM is gated to start after system-flatpak-setup.service completes on first boot, with a completion marker at /var/lib/cinnamon-flatpak-setup/done so this delay only applies during initial setup, and afterward boots behave normally while menus are populated correctly on first login.
It’s a bit of a kluge/hack, but there is an oddity: the first time I created my disk image and booted it up, it took a couple of minutes before LightDM came up, and then when I logged in, Cinnamon crashed and restarted itself. Weird. Then when I did it again (creating my disk image from scratch), I didn’t have the issue at all. So, there may be some timing issue going on. That being said, it’s not critical—if you sign out and back in, it’s fine. Just thought I’d mention it if you encounter it.
Thanks! Just looked at that — looks like they are building directly on the Fedora Atomic bases. Interesting, actually, because I knew that Fedora Atomic existed, but I had no idea a specific XFCE-Atomic base existed.
That being said, I’m cheating a little, as I’m using Universal Blue’s base image (which in turn pulls from Atomic), so I’m benefiting from their legwork. In addition, I’m using BlueBuild instead of a straight Containerfile method.
I just found out that it is possible to create an anaconda iso installer for this, so I’ll be trying that out soon. If so I’ll add it to the repo. That should make testing it far easier.
Cool! Haven’t had a chance to check this out yet, but will likely try it out this weekend. I might even try rebasing the 8GB laptop I mentioned to see how that goes (it already has my customized Aurora on it), since I could always reboot back if the Cinnamon config is incompatible with what’s already there.
I just triggered a manual build (automatic builds occur once a week). I’d have an ISO for you to download, but unfortunately GitHub has space limits when you try to post ISOs. So you’ll have to follow the manual build ISO instructions using bluebuild.
Yea, I’ve looked at warp and some wormhole stuff before. Very cool stuff. I’m also looking at a cloudflare R2 bucket which probably would hold my ISO easily and would be dirt cheap.
Wait…I always thought warp was a one to one thing. You can use it to send a file to many people (bandwidth allowing on your end of course). Sharing one code with many?
No it’s good for one offs - especially if that person is one of the early ones who might end up helping you down the road. Annoying but worth it.
If you want to do wider distribution Cloudflare is the way to go, you pay for storage instead of bandwidth egress. We run all of Bluefin for like $5 bucks a month.
Oh, don’t worry about that. My plan was to just copy parts of your recipe into a new recipe in my own repository. I’d just build the ISO manually on my main machine to try it out in a VM first, and then possibly rebase the one machine that already has my version of Aurora on it.
I still haven’t had a chance to look at it two weeks later, but hopefully soon. How has it been working out for you?
Pretty good actually! I’ve tightened it up a little and changed from the BlueBuild brew module to the Universal Blue Brew OCI container. @j0rge that is WAY cool! I even used that after forking the bootcrew arch repo and added it to that!
