Live ISO and installer

Any ALT Atomic image can be turned into a bootable Live ISO.

How it works

The ISO is built from two parts:

Who	Adds
atomic-live-iso-builder	bootloader, initrd, live user with autologin
The image itself	installer, image list, desktop settings

The image ships its part as APM recipes in /usr/share/atomic-live/. The builder runs them in name order:

/usr/share/atomic-live/
├── 10-readyset.yml
├── 20-installer.yml
└── 30-installer-images.yml

Recipes use the same format as image.yml. The files stay in the image but only run when the ISO is built.

Inheritance

/usr/share/atomic-live/ is inherited from the base image. If your image is based on Onyx, it already has the recipe that installs atomic-installer — just add your own file with the image list.

Building the ISO in CI

The alt-atomic/actions/live-iso action builds the ISO, optionally embeds images for offline install and uploads the result to the repository packages. See the action README for a workflow example and the inputs.

Building locally

atomic-live-iso-builder \
  --image altlinux.space/<user>/<image>:latest \
  --embed-image altlinux.space/<user>/<image>:latest \
  --output /var/tmp/my-image-live.iso

To embed several images, repeat --embed-image.

Installer in the image

The atomic-installer is installed by a recipe in /usr/share/atomic-live/, for example 20-installer.yml:

modules:
  - name: Add atomic-installer nightly repo
    type: repos
    body:
      name: atomic-installer-nightly
      custom:
        - rpm https://altlinux.space/api/packages/alt-atomic/alt/group/atomic-installer-nightly/sisyphus.repo x86_64 classic

  - name: Install atomic-installer
    type: packages
    body:
      install:
        - atomic-installer

Any other installer works too — the ISO builder does not depend on it.

Images offered for install

atomic-installer offers the images from /etc/atomic-installer/images.yml, in the listed order:

images:
  - image: containers-storage:altlinux.space/<user>/<image>:latest
    target: altlinux.space/<user>/<image>:latest
    title:
      en: My Image
      ru: Мой образ

  - image: docker://altlinux.space/alt-atomic/onyx/stable:latest
    title:
      en: ALT Atomic Onyx (GNOME)
      ru: ALT Atomic Onyx (GNOME)

• image — reference with a transport (docker://, containers-storage:, oci:), passed to bootc as is.
• target — registry image the installed system updates from. Required when image is a local copy.
• title — name per language; falls back to en, then to the reference.

Images embedded with embed-image are available as containers-storage:<reference>.