If you want to submit and/or maintain distribution of your choice for official Shells build, you must meet the following criteria:
- Make sure image is ready for Shells infrastructure (look for example into other OS build scripts here in repository).
- No password for users (we disable the passwords, enabled passwordless sudo and passwordless polkit auth in firstrun script, so keep that in mind).
- Set user to autologin (we try to achieve this in firstrun script but if you see difference not applying for your OS, be sure to do it).
- Disable power saving (screensavers, sleep, automatic logout etc).
- Disable logout option.
- Be sure to have in your image spice-vdagent and qemu-guest-agent.
All images are typically named as distribution-version-variation. For
example Ubuntu Focal with Ubuntu Desktop installed would be called
ubuntu-focal-ubuntu-desktop. All images providing a desktop environment must
end in -desktop.
By default Shells boots all images with the Shells kernel, which is a LTS vanilla kernel built by the Shells team. This kernel comes with an initrd that will perform a number of operations prior to booting the OS, such as ensuring the modules are installed for the running kernel, resizing the disk partition to use the whole disk, setup a swap partition, etc.
You can however supply your own kernel but will need to ensure the following:
- The image must be a 8GB or less BIOS-bootable bootable partition
- On boot, you should check if the disk is larger than the partition(s) cover, and resize the disk appropriately. If you have a swap partition you may consider moving it toward the end of the disk.
- Make sure you have the virtio modules enabled in your kernel, as well as anything required to run qxl if doing an desktop image.