leifliddy / asahi-rocky-usb

Creates a Rocky Linux usb drive that will boot on Apple M1/M2 systems

Creates a Rocky Linux usb drive that will boot on Apple M-series systems

This image was built on a Fedora system

Fedora Package Install
dnf install arch-install-scripts bubblewrap gdisk mkosi pandoc rsync systemd-container

Notes

• The root password is rocky
• The qemu-user-static package is needed if building the image on a non-aarch64 system
• This project is based on mkosi v20 which matches the current version of mkosi in the F39 repo
  https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/mkosi/
  However....mkosi is updated so quickly that it's difficult to keep up at times (I have several projects based on mkosi)
  I'll strive to keep things updated to the latest version supported in Fedora
  If needed, you can always install a specific version via pip
  python3 -m pip install --user git+https://github.com/systemd/mkosi.git@v20

To build a minimal Rocky Linux image and install it to a usb drive, simply run:

./build.sh -d /dev/sda

note: substitute /dev/sda with the device id of your usb drive

If you've previously installed this Rocky Linux image to the usb drive, you can wipe the drive and install a new image without having to repartition/reformat the drive by providing the -w argument

./build.sh -wd /dev/sda

Once the drive is created, you can locally mount, unmount, or chroot into the usb drive (which contains 3 partitions) to/from mnt_usb/ with

./build.sh mount
./build.sh umount
./build.sh chroot

note: mounting the usb drive is useful for inspecting the contents of the drive or making changes to it

To boot the usb drive on an apple silicon system, you could either:

1. Enter the following u-boot commands at boot time:

env set boot_efi_bootmgr
run usb_boot

2. Add the usb drive to the grub menu on the internal drive
   You just need to boot Linux on the internal drive, plugin the usb drive, and then update grub

[root@m1 ~]# grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
Generating grub configuration file ...
Found Fedora Linux Asahi Remix 39 (Thirty Nine) on /dev/nvme0n1p6
Found Rocky Linux 9.3 (Blue Onyx) on /dev/sda3
done

You should now see the /dev/sda3 entry in the main grub menu
If you don't see the grub menu at all or if the text is garbled, then ensure these options are set in /etc/default/grub and then run grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg on the internal drive

GRUB_TIMEOUT=5
GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE="menu"
GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT="gfxterm"
GRUB_FONT=/boot/grub2/fonts/unicode.pf2

Setting up WiFi

To connect to a wireless network, use the following sytanx: nmcli dev wifi connect network-ssid

An actual example: nmcli dev wifi connect blacknet-ac password supersecretpassword