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Live ISO for xfce-linux — an immutable XFCE Wayland desktop built on freedesktop-sdk and distributed as a bootc OCI image.

Modeled after projectbluefin/dakota-iso.

What this produces​

A UEFI-bootable live ISO that:

  • Boots directly into an XFCE Wayland desktop via GDM autologin as liveuser
  • Includes the tuna-installer Flatpak for GUI-driven bootc installation
  • Embeds the full xfce-linux OCI image in VFS containers-storage for offline installation (no network pull needed)
  • Uses systemd-boot — no GRUB2 or shim required

Build​

# Build the ISO (requires root for podman unshare + mksquashfs)
sudo just iso-sd-boot xfce-linux

# Output: output/xfce-linux-live.iso

# Test in QEMU (serial console):
just boot-iso-serial xfce-linux

# Test in QEMU (VNC display on :10):
just boot-iso-vnc xfce-linux

Debug builds​

# Enables SSH (liveuser:live, root:root) in the live session:
sudo just debug=1 iso-sd-boot xfce-linux
ssh -p 2222 liveuser@localhost

Architecture​

Three-stage container build (xfce-linux/Containerfile):

  1. xfce-linux-ref — pulls ghcr.io/hanthor/xfce-linux:latest to get kernel modules
  2. initramfs-builder — Debian stage: builds a dmsquash-live initramfs via dracut against xfce-linux's kernel
  3. final — xfce-linux: installs the new initramfs, pre-installs Flatpaks, runs configure-live.sh

ISO assembly (xfce-linux/src/build-iso.sh):

  • systemd-boot ESP with kernel + initramfs
  • LiveOS/squashfs.img — full rootfs + embedded OCI payload
  • xorriso with protective MBR + GPT for broad UEFI compatibility

CI​

GitHub Actions builds the ISO daily and on every push, uploads to Cloudflare R2 (if secrets are configured), and boot-verifies in QEMU by waiting for XFCE_LINUX_LIVE_READY on the serial console.