Build your Mer image in few minutes (using MIC)

Creating a new image for a certain embedded device is a boring process that can take a lot of time. For some time I’ve been working with MIC that is a rather easy to use tool for image creation.

MIC allows you to create filesystem tarballs, partitioned raw images, live CD images, etc… and you can create your ready to use Plasma Workspace image 😉

What you need: Mer SDK

How to create the image:

First of all you need to write your KickStart (.ks) file (you can also generate it using a yaml file). A KS file includes the list of repositories that are used to pull the packages, users, groups, misc settings, the list of packages (and patterns) that will be installed inside your image and some commands that are executed during image creation.

Here is an example of KS file:


lang en_US.UTF-8
keyboard us
timezone --utc UTC
part / --size 3000 --ondisk sda --fstype=ext3
rootpw rootpassword
user --name myuser --groups audio,video --password meriscool


repo --name=mer-core --baseurl=http://releases.merproject.org/releases/latest/builds/i586/packages --save --debuginfo --source
repo --name=mer-tools --baseurl=http://repo.merproject.org/obs/mer-tools:/stable/latest_i586/ --save --debuginfo --source


%packages
@Mer Core
openssh-server
%end


%post
echo Hello > /hello
%end


%post --nochroot
#More commands
%end

OK, now you are ready to create your image!

mic create raw mykickstart.ks -o myoutput --record-pkgs=name --pkgmgr=zypp --arch=i686

You will get your Mer image in a couple of minutes. Your image will contain all the packages included in @Mer Core pattern and openssh-server. Anyway it will not be possible to boot your system: you need to use an adaptation to make it fully working. You can easily find community adaptations for several boards and devices including RaspberryPi and x86 PCs.

More resources:

Some updates (about me and my life)

It has been a long time since my last post on this blog.
I’ve been busy with a lot of cool stuff recently and I haven’t had time to write more posts.
In the meantime my life changed a lot during last year, so I will spend few words on what happened.
At the end of September we launched the MISSUS experiment on BEXUS stratospheric baloon, it has been a success and it was really cool.
Few hours of experiment have took me hundreds of hours of work but it has been worth of it.
After the launch of MISSUS experiment I’ve started to spend most of my time with Ispirata, the company which I’m working for. Some days I’ve been working more than 8 hours day, but I really like what I’m doing because we are developing fresh and cool technologies. One of these projects is Hemera, a distribution for embedded devices based on Mer.
Part of my work on Hemera at Ispirata is also to contribute to Mer Project.
Unfortunately I don’t have a lot of time to contribute to KDE Plasma but I plan to find some spare time for it too, anyway part of my work is going to improve Plasma Active which runs on Mer, so part of my work is going to improve a KDE project 😉
So this has been my life during last year, I think I will post more further details soon about what I’ve been doing.