Create an ISO Installer

After creating one or more flash images (.img.gz files) using Create a Flash Image, you can wrap those images in a Hybrid ISO (.iso file) that can be directly booted when dd'ed to a USB flash drive, booted in a Virtual Machine, or mounted as an ISO disk.

The input .img.gz file(s) will be placed unaltered on the resulting ISO in the os/ directory along with generated .img.gz.sha1 files. Additionally, the current AstLinux changelog file will be included on the ISO.

The process is quite straight-forward, but does require the Development Environment to be installed.

$ ./scripts/build-runnix-iso
Usage: ./scripts/build-runnix-iso install_image.img.gz|install_image_dir [serial]

The first argument can be a single .img.gz file or a directory containing .img.gz files.

The optional second argument serial will create a serial console using 19200n8, without it the default is a VGA video console for the installer.

Note -> The resulting .iso file will be output to the current directory.

If your build system currently has an AstLinux build in the output/ directory with it's .config file, the ./scripts/build-runnix-iso script will save and restore that data while building the “runnix-iso” build. This process can take 10-30 minutes, so if you want to run the ./scripts/build-runnix-iso script multiple times in a row you can remove your current AstLinux build first as follows:

rm -rf output/
cp runnix-iso.config .config

In this case the ./scripts/build-runnix-iso script will not have an output/ directory to restore, so it will retain the “runnix-iso” build output/ directory. Additional ./scripts/build-runnix-iso calls will execute very quickly.

Finally, to see how this ISO installer can be used, follow New Installation for the process.