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Re: [LUG] Creating a small filesystem from RPMS



Simon Waters wrote:

Andrew Rogers wrote:


I need to create a directory structure that will be mounted over NFS as
a root filesystem on a remote machine.

An RPM based distro (Fedora Core 1 in this case) has the RPMs that I
need to extract to create this filesystem. The host machine that I will
use to create this filesystem will run another GNU/Linux distro (not
necesarrily Fedora), hence I can't copy the hosts filesytem files.

I have tried converting the RPMs to CPIO archives but then the
post-install RPM scripts don't run. I think the key may be to get the
RPM databases onto the filesystem first, but how?



rpm supports "--root".


Yep, that worked for me, thanks.

The Debian reference guide explains how to run Debian "unstable" in a
subdirectory of Debian "stable", overkill for your needs, but installing
Debian to a subdirectory is step 1 from what I recall.

That's almost what I want to do, but setup to run on a remote CPU.


Booting off a file system on a remote share is standard practice in many
places (Google "linux diskless workstations"), but not something I've
done, I use to boot lots of SUNs and xterms using tftp - happy days....


I have used LTSP, uses tftp to get the kernel. I need my own distro, my diskless number crunchers will also be monitor-less. I think such a cluster is called a Beowulf. I will certainly be stealing some ideas from LTSP to help my new project. The distro that I make will consist mainly of files taken from a community developed distro such as Fedora Core or Debian. For my project I am concerned with booting the remote machine and creating the filesystem, the packages are taken care of by Fedora Core or Debian developers.

Another RPM question: If I do:

# rpm --root=/home/andrew/tmp/rootfs/ -ivh /mnt/cdrom/Fedora/RPMS/bash-2.05b-31.i386.rpm

I get the following:

warning: /mnt/cdrom/Fedora/RPMS/bash-2.05b-31.i386.rpm: V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 4f2a6fd2
error: Failed dependencies:
libc.so.6 is needed by bash-2.05b-31
libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.0) is needed by bash-2.05b-31
libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.1) is needed by bash-2.05b-31
libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.2) is needed by bash-2.05b-31
libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.3) is needed by bash-2.05b-31
libdl.so.2 is needed by bash-2.05b-31
libdl.so.2(GLIBC_2.0) is needed by bash-2.05b-31
libdl.so.2(GLIBC_2.1) is needed by bash-2.05b-31
libtermcap.so.2 is needed by bash-2.05b-31
mktemp is needed by bash-2.05b-31


Is there anyway that RPM can install these depedencies without manually installing each RPM? I don't want to use a long list of RPMs to install since I would have to update the list for different distros.

I haven't tried creating a filesystem from .debs yet, but presumably I must install apt on my host (which isn't running Debian)? or will alien convert .debs to RPMs with 100% reliability?

Thanks
Andrew


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