On Tue, 20 Sep 2005, Mark Ryden wrote:
Hello LFS-support-list,
I finally succeeded to finish creating LFS (6.1 stable) , to boot
into LFS , and
it works ! This LFS project is great ! Thnks!
I have a question :
I want to make an installation CD (I am not talking about LIVE-CD, but a CD
for install,like we have in Linux Disrtors).
I want that CD to simply automatically untar a file (which includes
the contents of /mnt/lfs) to the hard disk .
(let's say that we know for shure that the target will have only one
partition, /dev/hda1,
and we know for sure that the HW is the same one like that on which
the current LFS
succeeds to boot).
For most people, this is far too limiting to be useful! I've bought 3
new athlon64s this year, using 2 motherboards (different network
adaptors). I also think only having one partition is insane! I
conclude that you support systems for a company, and are lucky enough to
have a number of supposedly identical machines :)
1)What is the recommended way for doing this ?
Let's say I don't want the user to select from any menu: I want simply
to insert the CD in the drive and booting it will cause it to install
LFS from the
CD on the disk,erasing everything that was there before , so next time
we will reboot
this machine from the HD it will reboot into LFS ?
We recommend you to build it on each machine ;) Seriously, if you have
a justifiable reason for doing this, you need to look at how the distros
do it. One way is to build a *minimalist* system to do the install
(things like uClibc and ash come to mind) - you are going to have to set
up a ramdisk to run the installer, and when you start you might not have
any swap available. Booting from a CD traditionally uses an eltorito
boot image, which seems to be limited to 2.88MB, so even with a
compressed ramdisk you can't fit a lot in. An alternative is to do what
knoppix does (cloop kernel module to store a much fuller, compressed,
system on the CD).
Actually, I imagine looking at knoppix would be a good idea anyway,
they seem pretty good at hardware detection and general setup.
2) Will such a thing work without further modifications to
scripts,etc.? (I mean recognizing the hw, the boot process , etc.).
I thought you'd already defined the target machines to be identical, so
that you didn't have to recognize the hardware :) I'm not trying to do
you down, I'm a trained analyst, so I'll ask questions you don't seem to
have asked! You probably want to generate unique hostnames for the
individual machines (e.g. by overwriting /etc/sysconfig/hostname after
you have copied the master to it). Certainly, the scripts for the
installer will be new and unique (you will replace init with a custom
script to mount the CD, prepare the disk, and do the install). Of
course, if you are using static IP addresses, you will have to create a
way of deciding which address to use for the current machine (which is
why distros do interactive installs).
To me it seems that there should be no problem with it and there
is nothing I should add
When I built my own rescue CDs I used the binary rootfs's from uClibc,
which helped considerably in fitting everything in - as long as you
don't need a module to boot, you can place it on the CD, then in a
script find the CD (search in /proc) and mount it at /usr with a symlink
to the modules, and a richer toolkit in /usr.
If you really think there should be no problem with it, I think you
will be in for a rich learning experience, which is why I'm bothering to
reply. You definitely need to specify to yourself exactly what you wish
to do - from that you can determine which tools you need (e.g. fdisk or
one of its relatives), and what the scripts on the installer should do.
Hopefully, you have built enough of BLFS for the newly installed systems
to be useful. Make notes on what you do, and when it works, consider
producing a hint.
Oh, and for any sort of bootable CD, CDRW is much cheaper in the long
run - starting from nothing, I had about a 25% success rate in booting
rescue CDs.
Have fun, and enjoy the learning. If you do this, please direct
subsequent questions to blfs-support or lfs-chat (chat is probably more
appropriate, particularly for scripting issues).
For most people, some combination of live/rescue CD, copying files over
the network, and manual intervention or editing to partition, set
hostname, and to generally make it appropriate is probably a much
simpler solution.
Ken
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