Add FCOS into Fedora Media Writer?

[kparal]

Hello, this is a friendly tip that FCOS can be made available in Fedora Media Writer, if you think it's a good idea and will benefit your user base. FMW is a simple tool that can take an ISO and copy it (dd-style) onto a thumb drive, so that users can install their systems from it. So, the most obvious use case would be to add FCOS bare metal installer ISO into FMW. Users can run FMW, select FCOS, it will create a thumb drive, they plug it into USB of the bare metal machine they want to install, boot from it and install FCOS. Currently, FCOS offers the ISO download, but the user guide only says "Burn the ISO to disk" (link) without explaining how. Linking to FMW (as one of possible options) could be an user experience improvement.

If you think FMW is a good tool to use, it is now maintained by Jan Grulich @grulja, so feel free to talk to him. It should be really simple to add FCOS in there. I'll watch this ticket, and if you decide to be present in FMW, I'll make sure to include this new functionality in Fedora QA's testing strategy. (We originally discussed this topic in our tracker, but I realized it makes more sense to track it here instead).

[jlebon]

That sounds great to me!

Implementation-wise, FMW can query the stream metadata to find the latest ISO to grab.

[pjvleeuwen]

Sounds like a good idea. One thing I ran into when installing on bare metal with USB is that when writing the ISO in DD Image mode (with rufus-3.13p.exe) I was not able to add the Ignition file to the USB stick afterwards. I solved it by putting the IGN file to another USB stick and mount that.

In the case of FMW it would be a nice bonus to be able to include 1 or more IGN files to the USB stick as part of the creation. This way you can provision a machine with only the single USB stick.

[pjvleeuwen]

Also, if this gets implemented: make sure to mention it on fedora-coreos-docs -> modules/ROOT/pages/bare-metal.adoc, I am sure users reading that page would like to know about FMW.

[bgilbert]

We have a mechanism for embedding an Ignition config in the live ISO that doesn't require any detailed knowledge of ISO images, so that should be possible to do from any program. Unfortunately that only gets you an Ignition config for the live boot, where you probably wanted to embed an Ignition config for the installed system. That currently requires wrapping an Ignition config inside an Ignition config and doing some other hackery. We need to improve that workflow.