How to generate custom ISO?

Harvey

People refused to listen to the rule about custom ISO's not being distributed. As a result access to the tooling to create one was removed.

streambinder

Really? That's very weird. No tooling or any tip at all?

Harvey

Yes really. No tooling is available to users to create their own custom Solus ISO. I'm unaware of any other methods.

Its a shame because it was useful. But what do you expect when people can't follow such a simple rule. Apparently people even sought support for said custom isos.

streambinder

Yup, it'd have been very useful. I will find a way. Thank you.

DataDrake

streambinder If you have any intention of redistributing said Pantheon ISO, you can't without removing all Solus branding which effectively requires hosting your own from-scratch repo since even our packages are branded. If your intent is to create a Pantheon spin of Solus or to volunteer as maintainer, I can tell you right now it will be rejected by us. We have no interest in supporting Pantheon on Solus.

streambinder

DataDrake I have none of those intentions. I just wanna create a custom ISO that I can use to troubleshoot issues which are decontextualised from local user movements and modifications and others DEs residues.

DataDrake

streambinder Well I'm sorry to say that based on the inquiries and conduct of other individuals, I cannot grant you or anyone else access to our ISO building materials at this time.

streambinder

Thank you for the informations.
What about de-branding? What would it mean (both generic software and repository side)?

JoshStrobl

streambinder

It means essentially mean:

Needing to deploy your own build and repo infrastructure to enable you to more rapidly perform builds. So this includes solbuild and ferryd.
Building your own toolchain from scratch, from GCC, glibc, etc. on up.
a. This includes rebuilding all the software on top of that.
Forking ypkg and performing necessary debranding.
You'll need to debrand multimedia libraries like gstreamer.
You'll need to remove any of the artwork which is explicitly licensed to us.
You'll need to ensure whatever desktop you're building doesn't ship with our branding packages.
Shipping no Software Center and no DoFlicky, or your own fork of them, with your own Appstream Data.
Repatching a multitude of software ranging from Epiphany, to GNOME Control Center, to debrand. This also includes repatching software like polkit.

Basically, building from scratch like we did. It isn't viable to just "debrand" Solus.

thauti

JoshStrobl Sad to hear ☹️ not very opensource/libre friendly. The possibility to rebuild from scratch is a guarantee of security and independence. If you and the team disappear such as Ikey does a few months ago. We don't have the possibility to continue (or with a huge amount of work).

I can understand that you don't want to support the weight of the support and the infrastructure extra-costs. But I guess "Community edition" should be available with a big red warning saying that is not officially supported as does manjaro for example.
About the brand, Ubuntu has a lot of fork using "ubuntu", and I don't think it's confusing for people, same for Debian. And I have some doubts about the legality to put something in GPL2, and put some protected trademarks inside, and say you can't reuse it without a fork

streambinder

Not viable, indeed. Just curious, but why? Don't you allow to developers base their own distribution over Solus, as it's actually happening for a very multitude of other distributions?
And why won't you consider to incorporate a Pantheon spin version? Note, I'm not proposing, I'm just curious of the technical reasons behind these choices.

JoshStrobl

streambinder

Don't you allow to developers base their own distribution over Solus, as it's actually happening for a very multitude of other distributions?

We're protective of our branding and we've worked hard to set a standard for what Solus is and what people should expect when downloading, installing, and using any of our editions. We're happy to work with OEMs (once we have our two-stage installer) but outside of that we have no desire or intention on facilitating the compiling and distribution of Solus branding ISOs, or their own forks / rebasing their own OS on top of ours.

And why won't you consider to incorporate a Pantheon spin version? Note, I'm not proposing, I'm just curious of the technical reasons behind these choices.

Because Pantheon, first-and-foremost, is designed for elementary OS. To such a degree that I had to patch Granite, their toolkit that everything of theirs uses, to not segfault when using DateTime APIs when it assumed you had their Pantheon schemas for time set. And working with them as a downstream would be miserable, they can't even merge a single one of my PRs in. Fixing an entire desktop and all their applications to work as we expect them to? That's a hard nope.

Pantheon, like Cinnamon, XFCE, etc. will never be supported or provided by us.

JoshStrobl

thauti Sad to hear ☹️ not very opensource/libre friendly.

It's no different than any other trademarks by any other project and them being rightfully protective (and legally having to be protective) about them. Example from Canonical.

The possibility to rebuild from scratch is a guarantee of security and independence.

All the sources are open so you can compile your own software. And something being open source is not a guarantee of its security, see OpenSSL issues in the past and any obvious CVEs.

We don't have the possibility to continue (or with a huge amount of work).

No offense but if all the Core Team and Global Maintainers get hit by a bus or whatever catastrophic accidental, I'd be hesitant to believe there would be enough people (we have plenty of contributors which are extremely smart and talented, I do want to note) with the technical expertise to maintain the project at its current scale. Not to mention those people wouldn't have access to the infrastructure directly, have push permissions for packages, or be able to contribute directly to Solus projects without forking them.

But I guess "Community edition" should be available with a big red warning saying that is not officially supported as does manjaro for example.

Or again, we could just not have one. And that is much simpler.

About the brand, Ubuntu has a lot of fork using "ubuntu"

Those brands such as Ubuntu Kylin are under the Ubuntu umbrella and have expressed consent to use the trademarks, infrastructure, etc. They're not really "forks".

And I have some doubts about the legality to put something in GPL2, and put some protected trademarks inside, and say you can't reuse it without a fork

We always have the option to re-license or rewrite something from scratch should it prove to be problematic. You'll notice most of our projects nowadays, such as solbuild, are actually in Apache-2.0, which explicitly has the following:

Trademarks. This License does not grant permission to use the trade names, trademarks, service marks, or product names of the Licensor, except as required for reasonable and customary use in describing the origin of the Work and reproducing the content of the NOTICE file.