Neon/InstallableImages

KDE neon live/installable images

• Images are at files.kde.org on depot (stores the most recent ones and all from today).

Our images are built with build.neon.kde.org using the scripts in pangea-tooling nci/imager imager.rb starts a new containment and runs build.sh and copies the result depot and images.neon.kde.org

build.sh is run in the containment and installs the packages needed, sets some variables and runs ubuntu-defaults-image

ubuntu-defaults-image is a script copied from ubuntu-defaults-builder, an Ubuntu script intended to make locale specific ubuntu derived images (we ignore the template for meta package and locale stuff).

It uses Ubuntu’s fork of Debian’s live-build, it’s quite an old fork (3.0~ from August 2012) with lots of Ubuntu specific patches

live-build uses livecd-rootfs, Ubuntu hooks (/usr/share/livecd-rootfs/live-build/ubuntu-core/) to build the squashfs live filesystem

Bits we need to fork and customise

• ubuntu-defaults-image is adapted to read our hooks and ignore the kubuntu-desktop meta package, this can probably be done away with
• config-hooks/apt.conf.sh adds apt debugging and no language pack settings
• config-hooks/repo.sh adds neon repo
• https://code.launchpad.net/~kdeneon/livecd-rootfs-neon/trunk is a branch of lp:livecd-rootfs/trunk it adds code to use our meta packages when PROJECT is set to neon
• neon:neon/seeds makes the neon-desktop and neon-live metapackages. Kubuntu uses a kubuntu-live apt task but our archive doesn’t support tasks so we use metapackages instead.
• https://launchpad.net/ubiquity-neon has our branch of ubiquity (branched from xenial tag) with a few changes to remove branding
• base-files sets important files including lsb-release
• plymouth theme is now from Plasma breeze-plymouth
• grub theme is now from Plasma breeze-grub
• syslinux theme is our own theme, TODO document how this works
• TODO: sign images

UEFI Support

live-build does not support UEFI. There's a few patches and addons to do so, see todo item for links.

The live-build UEFI bug has patches to add it natively. Netrunner just keeps it from Kubuntu as part of the remaster. Tanglu adds a efi script to live-build which takes it from debian-installer.

Ubuntu images get their livefs built on Launchpad (using a not very well documented and somewhat incomplete coded part of Launchpad which I think it only useable by this team for this purpose) https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-cdimage/+livefs/ubuntu/xenial/kubuntu/ which are seem to be built with livefs-rootfs (says launchpad code ./lib/lp/soyuz/templates/livefs-new.pt).

Then the ISO images are made by some magic proprietary script which takes the live image and adds its own stuff including UEFI support. http://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-archive/cd-build-logs/kubuntu/xenial/

KDE neon UEFI implementation June 2016

ISO booting by UEFI support is done by copying the grub-efi files from a Kubuntu ISO, putting them in live-build and in the lb efi script copying it into the binary/ directory and extracting the efi images (with mcopy) to add the right files on the CD. The breeze-grub theme is added and boot name changed to Neon in grub.cfg.

For UEFI support on installed systems Ubiquity needs a local apt archive on the CD image which contains grub-efi, we again grab a copy of this from Kubuntu images. It also needs a file called .disk/cd_type.

Ubiquity installs the EFI files into /boot/EFI/efi/neon on the installed system but the path "efi/ubuntu" is hardcoded in two places. The fwup efi binary which is used for firmware updates installs to efi/ubuntu and the Grub efi binary is hardcoded to look in efi/ubuntu for grub.cfg so a patch in ubiquity copies our grub.cfg into efi/ubuntu. This has the downside that any changes in the ubuntu grub.cfg will get removed, similarly a later Ubuntu install will wipe the neon grub.cfg but as the code to set up grub.cfg is the same for both having a custom config which differs is a very niche setup.

SecureBoot Support

The shim, grub and linux binaries are all copied directly from Kubuntu and signed with that so this just works. If we want to make changes such as not hard coding efi/ubuntu in the grub binary we'd need to build it ourselves, sign up to Microsoft's approval scheme. This is left as future work.

How this works with GPL 3 terms is another mystery for future work.