Creating ARM installation media

Prerequisites

1. An armv7hl machine running Fedora 21 or later
2. Adequate disk space to create the image (at least 2GB, sometimes more)
3. Network connection to the odroid-xu package repository
4. A target Kickstart file
5. The following packages must be installed:
   • anaconda
   • lorax

Specifications

Applies to all kickstarts in this repo unless otherwise noted.

1. No configured swap space
2. Single vfat partition of size 31MB for boot.ini
3. Single ext4 partition for rootfs
4. Default root password is super_secure
5. Default CPU governor is performance
6. Time synchronization is disabled

Creating the image

livemedia-creator --ks=<path to kickstart> --image-name=<name of image file> --tmp=<path to output dir> --keep-image --make-disk --no-virt

For example, to make a Fedora Minimal image for ODROID-XU:

livemedia-creator --ks=odroid-xu-minimal-ks.cfg --image-name=f21-minimal-odroid-xu.img --tmp=/root --keep-image --make-disk --no-virt

The resulting image will be ready to deploy when livemedia-creator completes.

Notes:

• Unfortunately, you'll need sudo access to the machine.
• You may see a message that says that there is Not enough space in filesystems for the current software selection. The kickstarts are designed to have just enough room to fit the packages in the list so we have smaller images to distribute. If the installation really does run out of disk space, you'll know it...
• This process can take at least 20 minutes, depending on the system's disk I/O performance.
• The console output is sporadic, so don't be surprised if you don't see any messages for 5-6 minutes straight.
• If things go crazy and you see lots of backtraces, it is likely that you'll need to restart the system. Sometimes lingering processes prevent dismounts, and the script doesn't handle it very well.
• livemedia-creator seems to have a bug if you don't set the --resultdir option. You can safely ignore the backtrace it generates at completion.