Re: [LUG] Creating a small filesystem from RPMS

[Simon Waters <Simon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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".

Almost all the installers do this sort of thing as they need to support
mounting "/dev/hda" (or whatever the real file system is), into the
memory resident "/" filesystem used during the install.

I'm not sure how it all gets kickstarted.

> I need to learn about RPM internals, anyone recommend a good guide?
>
> I would also be interested in extracting .deb packages into a directory
> structure.

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.

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....

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