Portal:KIWI/Topics

The easy recipes provided below allow you to cut & paste the commands to a terminal in an effort to help you to get started quickly with KIWI

Start Cooking General Preparation for all recipes

Before we start cooking, we need to make sure that we have all required ingredients ready and set up correctly.

Learnings: Here you will get a brief introduction to KIWI, the required packages, commands and other useful getting started information.

Get Juiced - our first recipe Ups - what? Which Juice?'

Juice is the pronunciation for JeOS, which stands for “Just Enough Operating System.” Wikipedia

The term JeOS refers to a customized operating system that precisely fits the needs of a particular application. This means it includes only those pieces of an operating system required to support a particular application, resulting in a small system.

Learnings: Based on one of the KIWI supplied templates build a JeOS (Just enough OS) system to get familiar with the KIWI process.

Tux Live - our second recipe A functional openSUSE live system.

A live system image is a bootable operating system on portable media (CD, DVD, or USB for example). The live system treats the CD/DVD/USB as the hard disk of the system. This provides us the opportunity to carry our system with us and use it on any computer we can get our fingers on.

Learnings: Build an image you can boot and run from a CD. Take a first step to modify a base KIWI configuration to change the content of the image.

Going virtual - our third recipe A Virtual Machine Image

The previous examples focused on the creation of iso images you could test and run with qemu or as a LiveCD/DVD. Kiwi supports also the creation of virtual images in various formats.

Learnings: Step into the world of virtualization with this VMware based example. Learn more about the XML elements and how they work.

Pimp your USB stick - our fourth recipe A System on a USB Stick.

This example shows how you can use Kiwi to create a image that can be installed on a USB stick. The resulting live USB stick allows you to boot the OS and use the system as if the OS were installed on the system hard drive.

Learnings: Learn howto build an image that can run a Linux system from a USB stick. Include some "firstboot magic" to help configure the system on initial boot.

A Minimal GNOME Appliance - our fifth recipe A GNOME System.

While our previous recipes focused on the various types of images we can create with Kiwi, this recipe focuses more on the content of the appliance and some configuration questions.

Learnings: Learn how to run GNOME as your graphical UI. Customize the base example to enable auto login, automatically start Firefox and customize GNOME right out of the gate.

Creating a Web-Kiosk image - our sixth recipe A Kiosk System.

In this example we combine various topics discussed previously to create an image that is a bit more functional.

Learnings: Using the Minimum GNOME example as a base to make appropriate modifications in order to create an image that may be used as a web-kiosk.

Create your own Cloud with help of 3 images

Setting up your own cloud can be pretty simple. This example describes how to create the infrastructure images and guest images for your own cloud. The infrastructure is based on Eucalyptus.

Learnings: Using 3rd party software within our images

The splash screens customize it

Building images with Kiwi is all about setting up an environment that meets your needs, i.e. customization. Thus, customization of the appearance during boot maybe just the ticket to make your image your own.

Learnings: The recipe describes the process of setting up customized splash screens for the boot process.

Data separation or handling partitioning

For OEM images partitioning is an often requested feature, especially since AutoYaST can do such a wonderful job with partitioning during install, well actually prior to installation.

This example provides some reasoning behind why Kiwi does not provide partitioning elements in config.xml (spare LVM support) and shows how to provide the generally desired data separation for application data and the OS part of an image as a post dump step.

the KIWI RELAX NG Schema Adding a New Element into the KIWI RELAX NG Schema

Unlike our previous examples which focused on the use of Kiwi to create an image, this example is more developer focused as it shows how to make modifications to the schema governing the config.xml file.

Learnings: Find out how you can develop and customize the KIWI RELAX NG Schema which is used for validating the XML configuration file