Projects/Plasma/NetbookReference

Introduction

Plasma is creating a reference image for the Netbook shell. The Plasma Netbook team hopes to learn what good default configurations are through user feedback and usability testing. By creating a Live CD/usb disk image that can be easily and directly modified, changes can get wider testing more quickly and with a shorter feedback cycle, and the Reference Edition contains only upstream packages with no distribution specific configuration, branding or patching.

The Plasma Netbook Reference Edition uses the Build Service for an easy way to generate Live images based up KDE trunk, and integrate changes from testers and developers. For now it is x86 only, based on openSUSE Factory and openSUSE 11.2.

The steps involved in contributing the the Plasma Netbook Reference Edition are:

Try the Reference Edition
Get set up to use the Build Service
Make your own branch
Build it
Tweak the settings
Test it
Contribute your changes back to the Reference Edition

or simply

Try the Reference Edition
Report bugs

Contributing

Try the Reference Edition

You can get the Reference Edition at http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Netbook . The build currently generates a raw disk image (including partitions) that you can extract to a USB disk (for example) with

bunzip2 -c Plasma-Netbook-Reference.i686-0.1.0-*.raw.bz2 > /dev/sdX

where /dev/sdX is the path of your USB disk (be careful!).

The current disk image is an installed disk image, not a Live CD, so no installation is necessary.

Get set with the Build Service

To start making your own changes, you need to a login to the Build Service website. An OpenID login is being worked on.

You need some tools to get started: A full list of repositories is at the osc link below, but some common ones are

To work efficiently with the OBS, you need the osc command line client. The Build Service website is also an OBS client. To build your own images, you need the kiwi command line tool, and the 'build' package.

Branch it in the OBS

The Build Service contains a branch/merge mechanism that allows you to submit your package modifications back to the main project in the same manner as a git tracking branch. This allows changes to be reviewed by the Plasma team.

Once you have the tools installed, create a branch of the basic packages with:

osc branch KDE:Netbook plasma-image
osc branch KDE:Netbook plasma-netbook-config

then check out your branch with the command output by 'osc branch' above.

Build it

Since image builds consume a lot of resources, only the main KDE:Netbook project builds on the server. You can build your branches locally like this:

osc build images i586 kde-four-live.kiwi On debian the signature of the packages cannot be verified, so we turned that off (needs to be fixed): osc build images i586 kde-four-live.kiwi --no-verify --linksources

--linksourcessave disk space by not copying packages to the build chroot but link them

The first build will take a long time to fetch the base packages from the server, but these are cached.

Tweak the settings

You can tweak the resulting image by either modifying the package list in the file kde-four-live.kiwi from plasma-image, modifying the packages themselves, or by changing the configuration files in the plasma-netbook-desktop package. You already have a checkout of these packages in your branch.

Test it

After changing something, rebuild the image and test it on a netbook or in a virtual machine.

Submit changes back

When you have changes in your branch that you want to merge back to KDE:Netbook, osc submitrequest will create a request to merge the changes. When the request is accepted, your branch will be rebased on the updated original

Technical Details

Packages

A short description of what we have in the project.

Most packages used to build the image come from openSUSE. By declaring additional or replacement packages in KDE:Netbook, or your branch, we customise the image.

plasma-image this 'package' is actually resulting USB stick image (or whatever)
plasma-netbook-desktop this package contains Plasma's modifications to the system configuration, for example starting the netbook plasma shell by default.

KIWI - creating a harddisk image

As a base we use KDE Four Live. The Build Service package for this is here.

The description what will be built in the end is in the .kiwi file.

Find it in your checkout in KDE:Netbook/plasma-image/kde-four-live.kiwi

For more documentation about KIWI, see here:

http://en.opensuse.org/KIWI
http://en.opensuse.org/Build_Service/KIWI/Cookbook

On the project page: we can configure whether to publish at the 'Flags for Experts' link

The status of the build can also be seen on the project page: https://build.opensuse.org/project/monitor?project=KDE:Netbook

there are some build repositories registered for the project:

images: the kiwi image, that will be the iso
openSUSE_11.2: the openSUSE stable repo
openSUSE_Factory: openSUSE development branch, when we want bleeding edge kernel, XOrg etc.

The openSUSE repos are needed when we create custom packages.

You can download the finished binary image whether or not publishing is using osc (or the web interface): osc getbinaries images i586 If you have a USB stick to test the image with, double check the device node, /dev/sdX is just an example, and directly bunzip the image onto the root device of the usb stick: bunzip2 -c Plasma-Netbook-Reference.i686-0.1.0-Build8.1.raw.bz2 > /dev/sdX.