Does Livecd-Creator work on a freshly-installed Rocky-8-XFCE-x86_64-latest distro?

Rocky Linux Help & Support
1

The title of this post is entered as a question arising from recent experiences in using livecd-creator on Rocky-8.8 distro installations.

Test Platform

The test machine for Rocky-8.8 .iso installs was a HP Compaq DC5800 which has
predominately-Intel device controllers and graphics card.

Concept for On-Going Generation of Suitable Distros from Kickstarts

In order to minimize the effort in generating new distros from kickstarts for new releases
of Rocky 8, a 3-partition installation for Rocky 8.8 was chosen, with a root partition for
successive Rocky 8 releases, a swap paritition, and a /home partition which would NOT
be reformatted from one install to the next to provide for an accumulation of developed .ks
files, and a repository for rebuilt application software and other data with projected future
usage.

Initial installation and tests

The Rocky-8-XFCE-x86_64-latest.iso, upon release of Rocky-8.8, was downloaded and
installed on the test machine. Livecd-creator runs were attempted on two .ks files available
from earlier work:
-rocky-8-xfce-elrepo.ks, provided by nazunalika
-rocky-8-xfce-customelrepo.ks, which provided access to a CD containing repositories
for the Fedora-29 kernel modules and the Fedora-27 graphics modules.

Both files required that the explicit references to version 8.7 repositories be changed to
version 8 repositories, implying that the latest such repositories would be used.

Livecd-creator runs with the latter of the 2 .ks files always failed with one of 2 errors:
-/usr/bin/mandb: /usr/share/man/man3/rpc.3 no such file or directory
-error: Rocky Linux-8 Appstream Errors during downloading meta data for
repository “Appstream” curl error(6) couldn’t resolve host name for
https://mirrors.rockylinux.org/mirror.list ?

Livecd-creator runs with the former of the 2 .ks files always failed with the 2nd error.
No remedies prescribed in web articles about similar errors, such as running dnf clean,
helped.

In trying to determine what was going wrong with the current tests, I reviewed my past work:
-The earliest efforts with livecd-creator were conducted on this same test machine with Rocky-8.7-
minimal installed.
-The recent efforts with livecd-creator were conducted on a HP Pavilion Media Center m8247C
with SATA disk controllers and nvidia graphics card, with rocky-8-xfce-elrepo.iso installed.

This meant that the current tests, for the first time, were being attempted on a 1st-generation
live Rocky .iso.

I decided to replace the current rocky-8-xfce-x86_64 latest install on the test machine with the
most-easily installed, graphics-enabled distro that could be assembled, a rocky-8.8-minimal .iso
with e16 and icewm light-weight desktops.

I followed the procedure described in the forum post,

https://forums.rockylinux.org/t/e16-and-icewm-light-weight-desktops-for-rocky-8-6/7612

The current/latest version of e16 is e16-1.0.27.
The livecd-creator runs that previously failed now successfully completed.

Another way to phrase the subject question:

Is there some characteristic in 1st-generation Rocky live .iso’s that prevent livecd-creator from
working properly ???

Len E.

2

It should be noted that the testing failures occurred near the end of the livecd-creator runs,
after an elapsed time of approximately 1/2 hour.

Len E.

3

livecd-creator and the live image you’re installing (and subsequently running livecd-creator on) are mutually exclusive. livecd-creator may work, it may not work. the environment it runs in could allow it to work, but it may not work. This is precisely why we use livemedia-creator in a mock chroot, because livecd-creator tends to be unreliable in that regard.

I would suggest that if you are having so many issues with livecd-creator that you use livemedia-creator instead.

4

Hi nazunalika:

Thank you for your expert clarification !!

Len E.