ostreecontainer | Install Flatpaks with Anaconda

[p5]

Hey Anaconda team

The Universal Blue team are trying to create a LiveISO for our Fedora Silverblue bootc images.
We feel we're 95% of the way there - we've got an offline live ISO working with embedded Flatpaks, our ostree containers installing and even the lovely new WebUI completing a successful install.

The final piece of the puzzle is to copy over the embedded Flatpaks from the ISO onto the deployed sysroot.
We've installed flatpaks inside the ISO to /var/lib/flatpak, symlinked /var/lib/flatpak/repo -> /flatpak/repo, and generated the summary files with flatpak build-update-repo /var/lib/flatpak/repo. This causes the installation to succeed without errors, and we can see the Anaconda Flatpak backend getting called, however the Flatpak install step happens within a second and none of them end up on the deployed sysroot.

We would be immensely grateful if you could share with us the requirements from Anaconda's side for installing Flatpaks onto the deployed sysroot, since we're not familiar with the codebase enough to reverse engineer things and we seem to be exploring undocumented territory.

(CC @SNThrailkill - you might also be interested in this 😄 )

[jkonecny12]

Hi, that sounds great. I'm happy you are so close. Could you please provide me the ISO image for testing. I need to check it to be able to tell what exactly is happening there.

[p5]

Hey Jiri
Thanks for taking a look!

We've uploaded our current iteration of the live ISOs here - https://download.projectbluefin.io/bluefin-live-lts.iso

This is based on CentOS 10 since that's our simplest image, and therefore doesn't contain the WebUI (you don't seem to be building the webui package for EL10), but contains anaconda-live which you can open from the applications menu (search "Install").

[jkonecny12]

Thanks, I'll take a look. Just for information we don't plan to add EL10 as it would be hard to maintain and we don't have capacity spare for such attempts unfortunately.

[jkonecny12]

I found the reason, don't know the issue directly but your flatpak repository is not browsable.

Try to do this in your ISO:

flatpak remote-add --no-gpg-verify anaconda file:///var/lib/flatpak/repo
# see error when loaded about listing
flatpak remote-ls anaconda
# another error

I'm not sure what exactly is the issue but we have to be able to list the repository or we don't know what is inside so we can't deploy everything there.

This is not happening with SilverBlue ISO which can be tested on your system.

curl -OL https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/development/rawhide/Silverblue/x86_64/iso/Fedora-Silverblue-ostree-x86_64-Rawhide-20250410.n.0.iso
mkdir mnt mnt-install.img
sudo mount ./Fedora-Silverblue-ostree-x86_64-Rawhide-20250410.n.0.iso ./mnt
sudo mount ./mnt/images/install.img ./mnt-install.img/
sudo flatpak remote-add --no-gpg-verify file:///$PWD/mnt-install.img/flatpak/repo
sudo flatpak remote-ls anaconda

No error is visible and listing just works.

You need to fix your flatpak repository on ISO @p5.

[jkonecny12]

Hi, any update about that, do you need some help from our side to resolve this?

[jkonecny12]

Also for the "near" future we are changing this approach to use preinstall.d:

#6056

Right now, it is only for DNF installations but the plan is to replace the existing solution with this and make it a solution for different payloads (DNF and ostree at least). The point of this solution is to have Flatpaks defined by payload, so you will have flatpak/preinstall.d in the ostree container and when we detect that we will install Flatpaks after the main installation.

[jkonecny12]

Is web UI works for you out of the box on Fedora 42? Do you need some more adjustments from us?

[p5]

We didn't try in Fedora 42 but in Fedora 41 everything seemed to work. As soon as you install the anaconda-webui package, that opens instead of the regular Anaconda and the installation succeeds.

Do you need some more adjustments from us?

I'll hold off on answering this until we've put the webui into the hands of more UBlue maintainers.
That being said, if you could enable anaconda-webui builds for EPEL10, that would be great and would save us maintaining our own COPR 😄

A key area we believe could be improved in the overall bootc/rpm-ostree installation experience is enforcing certain requirements are met in terms of partitioning. Bootc/rpm-ostree is quite picky when it comes to the filesystem layout, and correctly configuring custom partitioning is a frequent topic that comes up with new users.
If we can enforce things like no subfolders of /var should be a separate partition, that would be a huge improvement, though probably doesn't come into the scope of the webui.

[jkonecny12]

We have it planned to have a possibility to support separate partitions but it's not that high on priority list.

However, if having webui in ELN will help you a lot I will bring that up to discussion to the team. Let's see what we can do about it.

[jkonecny12]

@p5 I wonder, could you please explain to me why are you building ISO based on CentOS Stream 10. I thought you are working on top of Fedora.

From the web UI side, I don't think we have a capacity to have it supported on EPEL10 neither CentOS Stream 10 in any reasonable way and you will probably hit a wall with this soon too. The point is that web UI is moving rapidly and have requirements on new features for Anaconda backend and RHEL-10 won't be getting these as it would cost us a lot of resources to backport these. Anaconda philosophy is that RHEL-X branches are stable or getting only requested changes with priorities, we don't do rebases on RHEL as these are usually pretty painful. We are thinking about shared codebase between RHEL and Fedora but we are still far away from that.

Is this your goal or just something temporary solution?