[Feature Request] Distribution independent

[Diaoul]

This is an neat script however the fact that it only runs with Ubuntu is huge constraint IMO. Would it be possible to make it independent of the underlying distribution?

[dannf]

Sure, it's possible, but would require some work. The issue I see is getting copies of pxelinux.0 and ldlinux.c32 (is that even needed?) from somewhere. There is an unused download_pxelinux() function that can download a copy of pxelinux.0 from a d-i tree, but the problem there is that Ubuntu has dropped d-i support, so that tree won't be published by newer releases. The right answer might be to download the associated .deb files from a mirror and extract files from them manually. But for that we'd need to implement apt mirror parsing support. A hack might be to always download the version from bionic, since it still has quite a few years of support left.

One thing possibly worth considering is a --disable-bios flag, or similar, that only generates uefi artifacts. I don't think the uefi artifacts currently depend on any specific local files.

[Diaoul]

After some effort I have made a bash script that will prepare the files for the TFTP server and the webserver.

#!/bin/bash
set -euo pipefail

url='https://releases.ubuntu.com/20.04/ubuntu-20.04.1-live-server-amd64.iso'
grub_url='http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/focal/main/uefi/grub2-amd64/current/grubnetx64.efi.signed'
server='${pxe_default_server}'
tftp_root='/tftp'
iso=$(basename $url)

echo "Preparing for $iso"

# download the iso
if [ ! -f $iso ]; then
    echo "Download ISO..."
    curl -sfLo $iso $url
fi

# copy cloud-init files
mkdir -p www
echo "Copy iso and cloud-init files..."
cp -f $iso www/$iso
cp -f user-data.yaml www/user-data

# copy kernel and initramfs from iso
mkdir -p tftp
if [ ! -f tftp/initrd ] || [ ! -f tftp/vmlinuz ]; then
    echo "Copy kernel and initramfs..."
    mkdir mnt
    sudo mount -o ro www/$iso mnt/
    [ -f tftp/vmlinuz ] || cp -p mnt/casper/vmlinuz tftp/
    [ -f tftp/initrd ] || cp -p mnt/casper/initrd tftp/
    sudo umount mnt/
    rmdir mnt
fi

# download grub image
if [ ! -f tftp/pxelinux.0 ]; then
    echo "Download GRUB image..."
    curl -sfLo tftp/pxelinux.0 $grub_url
fi

# copy grub configuration
echo "Copy GRUB configuration..."
mkdir -p tftp/grub
sed -e "s|{{server}}|$server|g" \
    -e "s|{{root}}|$tftp_root|g" \
    -e "s|{{iso}}|$iso|g" \
    grub.cfg > tftp/grub/grub.cfg

echo "Done!"

Not as refined as your script but this is enough for my need. Feel free to close the issue.

[dannf]

I think we should keep this open because it would be nice to not have to install Ubuntu before you can install Ubuntu :)

One other blocker here is that we'd need to remove the dependency on python3-distro-info.