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⚠️ Alpha — early development. Not production-ready. APIs and behaviour may change without notice.

License

Aurora Tromso is a BuildStream-based KDE Linux OCI/bootc image, modeled on Project Bluefin's projectbluefin/dakota. It builds KDE Plasma 6 on top of freedesktop-sdk and publishes a bootable OCI image to ghcr.io/tuna-os/tromso.

Status: Builds successfully and boots to a working KDE Plasma 6 Wayland desktop.

Architecture​

Aurora Tromso is a single repo — all KDE/Plasma/freedesktop-sdk .bst elements live directly in elements/, consolidated in from the former tuna-os/kde-build-meta junctioned repo (now archived) to remove a class of junction-nesting bugs and separate-repo staleness tracking:

tuna-os/tromso
├── elements/
│   ├── kde/                  qt6 (~30), frameworks (~70), libs (~17), plasma (~41), apps (~9)
│   ├── kde-linux-deps/       KDE-Linux-specific system dependencies
│   ├── kde-linux-system/     image/initramfs/repart config
│   ├── core-deps/, core/     shared core OS dependencies
│   ├── freedesktop-sdk.bst   external junction (still a real junction — freedesktop-sdk
│   │                         is genuinely upstream, unlike the retired kde-build-meta one)
│   ├── tromso/                Aurora Tromso-specific layers (theming, apps, overlays)
│   └── oci/tromso.bst        top-level build target → ghcr.io/tuna-os/tromso
└── Justfile

Quick Start​

Prerequisites​

  • Podman
  • just (task runner)
  • ~100 GB free disk space for build cache

Build​

git clone https://github.com/tuna-os/tromso.git
cd tromso

# Background build with live log tailing
just bst-build

# Or foreground build + OCI export
just build

Boot a VM for testing​

# Generate a bootable disk image (requires a completed build)
just generate-bootable-image

# Boot the image in QEMU
just boot-vm

# SSH in (password: aurora)
ssh -p 2222 root@localhost

Useful Justfile recipes​

RecipeDescription
just bst-buildBackground build, logs to /var/tmp/aurora-build.log
just buildForeground build + OCI export
just logTail the build log
just generate-bootable-imageCreate a bootable raw disk image via bootc
just boot-vmBoot the raw image in QEMU (SSH on port 2222, serial on 4444)
just bst <args>Run any arbitrary bst command inside the build container

CI/CD — CASD​

The CI workflow (.github/workflows/build-buildgrid.yml) builds oci/tromso.bst with local CASD on the runner, then pushes the result to GHCR:

ghcr.io/tuna-os/tromso:latest
ghcr.io/tuna-os/tromso:<date>
ghcr.io/tuna-os/tromso:<git-sha>

How it works:

  1. GitHub Actions runs BuildStream inside the pinned bst2 container
  2. BuildStream uses local CASD (~/.cache/buildstream) with CI-tuned scheduler settings
  3. The built target is exported as an OCI image and pushed to GHCR

Cold builds (empty CASD cache on the runner) are slower; warm runner caches significantly reduce runtime.

Triggers: push to main (element changes), daily at 06:00 UTC, manual dispatch.

Updating KDE Packages​

KDE package .bst definitions live directly in elements/kde/, elements/kde-linux-deps/, etc. — edit them in place and commit, same as any other element. No separate repo or junction update step.

See AGENTS.md for full conventions and workflows.

Verifying Signatures​

OCI images and live ISOs are signed keylessly with cosign via GitHub Actions OIDC (Sigstore/Fulcio) — no long-lived signing key to leak or rotate.

OCI images:

cosign verify ghcr.io/tuna-os/tromso:latest \
  --certificate-identity-regexp 'https://github.com/tuna-os/tromso/\.github/workflows/build-tromso-multirunner\.yml@.*' \
  --certificate-oidc-issuer https://token.actions.githubusercontent.com

Live ISOs (.sig/.cert are published alongside each dated ISO, e.g. tromso-live-<date>-<sha>.iso.sig):

cosign verify-blob tromso-live-<date>-<sha>.iso \
  --certificate tromso-live-<date>-<sha>.iso.cert \
  --signature tromso-live-<date>-<sha>.iso.sig \
  --certificate-identity-regexp 'https://github.com/tuna-os/tromso/\.github/workflows/build-iso\.yml@.*' \
  --certificate-oidc-issuer https://token.actions.githubusercontent.com

References​

ISO Builder (merged from tromso-iso)​

Part of the TunaOS ecosystem. Docs · Contributing