You have multiple options to build the image. The easiest option with the least requirements to your computer is Building with GitHub Codespaces.

To build with GitHub Codespaces, first create a repository based on this template repo.

Create the repo in your own user account and give it a name. Make the repo public.

Open a new Codespace in that repo.

Run the build-codespace script like this:

./build-codespace base

This will call the build script with a few Codespace specific additions.

It will take a few minutes and produce a lot of output.

Your image is built. See the line with the .raw file? That's your image.

Use that file name to run your image now using this command:

sudo ./run-vm.sh your-image-name.raw

With Podman Desktop installed and set up, you should be able to run ./build base from the terminal of your mac or Windows laptop.

You will need to setup QEMU to run the image.

Using the imagebuilder-qemu-amd64 or imagebuilder-qemu-arm64 image from https://github.com/gardenlinux/dev-image, you can get a virtual machine running that's set-up for building images. Follow the instructions in the readme.