Squashible is a tool created to generate a bootable LiveOS rapidly and consistently across multiple operating systems. It primarily relies on dracut to boot the LiveOS.

It utilizes docker to create enough operating system for Ansible to function and apply all configuration changes from that point. It then packages up the build into a vmlinuz, an initrd.img, and a rootfs.img.

This is a work in progress. Things will probably blow up. Pull requests and issues welcome!

Recommended Build Server Versions:

Fedora 23
Ubuntu 15.10

Required Packages:

Ansible >= 2.0.1.0
Docker

Edit the group_vars/all file and set the appropriate settings. Recommended settings to change are:

To run squashible:

ansible-playbook -i hosts_generator.py <playbook.yml>

Available playbooks to run:

Output of the build will be put into {{ outputpath }} which by default is ./live_output directory.

Here are some examples for booting the image once you've generated one:

kernel http://$deployment_server/images/images/fedora-23-kvm/vmlinuz
module http://$deployment_server/images/images/fedora-23-kvm/initrd.img
imgargs vmlinuz root=live:http://$deployment_server/images/fedora-23-kvm/rootfs.img ip=dhcp nameserver=8.8.8.8 nomodeset rd.writable.fsimg rd.info rd.shell

kexec -l vmlinuz —initrd=initrd.img \
—command-line=“root=live:http://$deployment_server/images/fedora-23-kvm/rootfs.img \
ip=dhcp nameserver=8.8.8.8 rd.writable.fsimg rd.info rd.shell”
kexec -e

You can use the user live and the password live from the console. The user is disabled from remote ssh access. If you want to log in remotely, be sure to set a public ssh key in group_vars/all.

OpenSUSE currently has issues booting due to the DHCP daemon it uses.

These iPXE disks will automatically load into boot.squashible.com. These contain live images that have been generated for demonstration puposes. Make sure you assign 4GB to 8GB of RAM for the images to load properly. If you run into any errors or kernel panics, usually the cause is not enough memory being available.

You can also chainload into boot.squashible.com if you already have netboot.xyz:

chain --autofree http://boot.squashible.com