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Obarun ISOs are now built automatically every month

Dear Obarun Community,

Obarun install images are no longer built by hand. A GitLab pipeline now builds them on its own, on the first day of every month, and publishes them without anyone having to press a button. The download page always points at the newest image, so there is nothing to look up and no stale link to avoid.

A fresh image every month

The problem with a hand built ISO is not the building, it is the ageing. An image published once and left alone drifts further from the repositories every week, until a fresh install spends its first hour downloading updates, and until a bug fixed months ago is still the first thing a newcomer meets.

A monthly build removes that drift. Each image is assembled from the repositories as they stand on the day it is built, so an install started with this month's ISO begins on a system that is already current.

The version is simply the build date, so an image tells you its age at a glance:

obarun-2026.09.01-x86_64.iso
obarun-JWM-2026.09.01-x86_64.iso

Two images per build

Each run produces two images, one per theme:

  • obarun, the minimal image, a console system with the core tools and the 66 services needed to boot and recover,
  • obarun-JWM, the same base plus a graphical session built around the JWM window manager, with the installer reachable from a desktop icon and from the System entry of the JWM menu.

Both are live media: they boot into a usable system, announce their credentials on the login screen, and carry the installer with them.

Where to get them

Two routes, depending on what you want:

  • web.obarun.org/download always serves the latest image. The page follows what the pipeline publishes, so it updates by itself.
  • The releases page of the iso-builder repository keeps one release per image and per month. Use it when you want a specific version rather than the newest one. Every release links its image and the md5sums.txt of its build, so you can check what you downloaded before writing it to a stick.

Built by the installer itself

The images are not assembled by a script of their own. iso-builder calls obinstall-cli, the command line side of the new Obarun installer, on a mounted image file, exactly the way an operator would call it on a disk.

That is the point worth keeping: the live medium and a disk install are produced by the same code path. Package installation, the theme overlay, the 66 services, the users, the initramfs, all of it is the installer's work in both cases. What the ISO does on top is only what a bootable medium needs: the archiso initramfs, the boot menus for BIOS and UEFI, the squashfs, and a handful of live-only files such as the /etc/issue that announces the live credentials.

Each build is also booted in a virtual machine before it is published, as a smoke check that the image starts at all.

Contributing an image

If you would like to see another Obarun image, the work does not happen in iso-builder.

An image is a theme, and themes live in the obinstall repository: a package list, the 66 services to enable, the files to drop into the system, and a customizeChroot hook. Adding a theme there is what makes a new image possible, and wiring it into the monthly pipeline is then a few lines in .gitlab-ci.yml.

Only what belongs to the medium rather than to the system goes into iso-builder: live-only packages, boot menu entries, and the live overlay files.

Both repositories document the split, see the README.md of iso-builder and docs/theme-authoring.md in obinstall.

Thank you for your continued support of Obarun.

Eric Vidal: [email protected]