This PR makes it possible to do what we need: https://github.com/osbuild/images/pull/322 It's stuck in review (waiting for Simon to fix the git history) from before the holidays but It Works.
(Please pass my regards to mvo, I worked with him for a long time at Canonical, I was so happy to see him working on osbuild, feels like reconnecting with an old friend!)
Once that's merged, adding the ability to composer becomes very straightforward and what you'll be able to do is build an ISO that embeds an oci ostree-based container image with Anaconda configured to install it. There's some bits that aren't configurable completely (yet), but we can figure those out. Like maybe we can add an option to make the installer fully unattended vs manual
fully unattended would be cool if you were doing a mass deployment of machines. I was talking with j0rge and kyle last night and making universal blue a full fledged chromebook alternative would be really cool!
we're writing a fixed kickstart file onto the ISO because we need this for an internal project. The plan is to have the options in osbuild to do this properly and then we can control things more sanely
I know this get asked a lot, but because things change very often with a new version of Ubuntu every 6 months, I'm curious if anything has changed regarding this question. I'm currently using Live ...
I'm sure there's a way but might not be straightforward. The payload for installation and the deployed root tree are quite different. I guess you could always just have both on the same ISO
we've hit 5m pulls without reliable installer, I think if we helped out and pushed this one final bit we could go from the worst installer in linux to the best one.
ok another question, for netinstall options, the issue we had with it in the past is it wouldn't retry, so if the network connection wasn't steady it would fail right away, we've outright just stopped recommending it.
and also do we know where in anaconda we'd do the flatpak installs so we can throw away a bunch of this dotfile jank? (That's more of a question for Kyle and RJ)
Thanks so much for the update, it's been great watching the git storm upstream, I just needed a high level explanation of what's happening hah. I hope to buy beers next time I am in europe!