Sculpt Customisation
The modularisation of Sculpt with release 22.02 enabled us to easily build customised Sculpt images. Instead of personalising my Sculpt OS via config files on the used file system, I've been managing my customisations in a separate repository since then. In this article, I want to share what modifications have worked out for me and provide ideas to fellow Genodians.
In order to keep my customisations separate from the main Genode repository, I created a separate sculpt repo. This repo hosts my sculpt customisations as well as additional depot recipes.
Depot Recipes
Most notably, I added two meta pkg archives: sculpt_packages and goa_distribution. The former aggregates additional archives I need to publish because I'm referencing them in my depot index. The latter aggregates archives that I need for my Goa projects Moreover, I added a pkg/vbox6-block-capture archive that applies changes to the vbox6 runtime so that I am able to run my native Linux installation as a VM in Sculpt as I wrote in this article.
Sculpt Modifications
I based my jschlatow-pc.sculpt on the default-pc.sculpt and added the following lines:
ram_fs: depot usb: jschlatow event_filter: jschlatow nitpicker: jschlatow deploy: jschlatow-t490s
The ram_fs modification is very useful for testing since it saves downloading (and publishing) the referenced depot archives. When clicking the "Use" button in Sculpt for the ram_fs, the depot will be populated. One can even copy it over to the USB drive or hard disk using the Inspect view.
For the usb config, I added policies for the integrated webcam and LTE modem.
I customised my event_filter config to apply key remappings (CAPSLOCK -> ESC), add a KEY_PRINT mapping for triggering screenshots, and integrate dynamically changing remapping rules via user_keys.
In the nitpicker config, I added the global keys KEY_PRINT and KEY_SCROLLLOCK for the screenshot and user_keys components.
In addition to these customisations, I added a bunch of launchers:
launcher: mobile_network user_keys archlinux bsd_audio_drv usb_webcam mixer launcher: battery lock falkon morph falkon-private morph-private launcher: screenshot dotfiles_fs unix_shell
These launchers split into three groups. The first group consists of launchers that reference pkg archives from genode and genode-world (e.g. mobile_network, user_keys, bsd_audio_drv). The second group comprises launchers referencing archives from other depot users (e.g. battery by alex-ab, falkon and morph-browser by cproc). The third group contains launchers that base on my Goa projects (e.g. screenshot, unix_shell).
Furthermore, I added presets not only for my personalised deploy config but also for mobile_browsing, unix_shell, and shutdown:
presets: jschlatow-t490s mobile_browsing unix_shell shutdown
Mobile_browsing starts a falkon browser connecting to the mobile_network component. Unix_shell showcases my version of the system shell with additional tools such as vimdiff, grep, find and less. Shutdown uses acpica and dynamic_rom to power the system off after a grace time of 10 seconds.
Release Workflow
In addition to following the instructions for building a Sculpt image from source, I need to create and publish the following meta archives for every new Sculpt release.
genode/> ./tool/depot/create UPDATE_VERSIONS=1 FORCE=1 REBUILD= \
jschlatow/pkg/x86_64/goa jschlatow/pkg/x86_64/sculpt_packages \
jschlatow/pkg/x86_64/goa_distribution
genode/> ./tool/depot/publish_current \
jschlatow/pkg/x86_64/goa jschlatow/pkg/x86_64/sculpt_packages \
jschlatow/pkg/x86_64/goa_distribution
Since I'm using archives that I manage with Goa in my customised Sculpt, I must also build and publish my Goa projects. First, I bump the project versions as follows:
goa-projects/sculpt> goa bump-version -r
This command recurses into the subdirectories, finds version files and updates these to the current date. Next, I publish my depot index that I manage with Goa. This automatically builds, exports and publishes the referenced Goa projects:
goa-projects/sculpt> goa publish --versions-from-genode-dir ~/repos/genode
Last, I update the versions in the launcher files of the second and third launcher group. After this, I am able to build my customised Sculpt image:
genode> make -C build/x86_64 run/sculpt KERNEL=nova BOARD=pc SCULPT=jschlatow