On Tue, 3 Jun 2003, John wrote: > > it uses stage2.img). There shouldn't be that many technical issues about > > getting this to work correctly, so did it just fall off the radar at Red > > Hat? > Tecnical issue: Where's it going to put the installer's filesystem? With > NFS, it cn mount the filesystem via NFS. Yes, I looked at that, but it could easily store it on a ram disk. The RPMs themselves would still need to be transferred seperately, but this is an SMOC, and not a real technical limitation. > Note that it's Red Hat Linux 9, not 9.0. Calling it 9.0 implies there > will be a 9.1, and I'm offering London to a brick there won't be. Yes, you're probably right. Leave it to Red Hat to get rid of a perfectly good numbering scheme. I've been using RHL since 3.0.3 though so I guess this isn't the first time their versioning will get all screwy. > Install RHL 9 on a computer. Back it up using (maybe) tar. > Restart it somewhere into a directory on your workstation, maybe into > /var/local/RedHat/9 > To do you work, > chroot /var/local/RedHat/9 You don't really need to even install it to a seperate computer. You can create a fake root directory and use "rpm --initdb" to start an rpm database inside of that fake root. Then just mull through the comps list and start installing rpms with the "--root=" option and slowly build up a filesystem. If you want to get really fancy, you can solve the dependency tree and come up with an ordered package list. You can do this pretty easily with a perl/python script which reads in the output of "--provides" and "--depends" of the complete rpm package set. My problem with this though is that it's an ugly hack. It would be nice if Red Hat would fix their makefiles to make them more relocatable, although I guess it's probably not in their best interest to do so. At any rate, it's not really that difficult to muck around with them to get them to work correctly and you end up with a more useful and relocatable cross compile environment. > If you install RHL 9 on the same computer, you don't need to use tar to > transfer the filesystem: simply mount it in (maybe) /var/local/RedHat/9. > > I use some of this to give me a Debian environment on RHL 7,3, I've done that before with LNX-BBC. One thing you want to watch out for is removing a directory which has been mounted into the chroot environment. I ended up deleting my entire home directory by accident because rm was recursing through each sub directory back into my home directory. Very evil. --Patrick.
