User:Wwoods/Building images with treebuilder

What's treebuilder?

Treebuilder is the new branch of Lorax which builds Anaconda images that boot like regular Live images. The advantages of this approach are:

1. The installer uses much less RAM and starts up much faster than it did in F15
2. The initrd is a normal dracut image, so:
   • There's a shell in initrd.img
   • No more maintaining the ancient, crusty loader codebase. yay!
3. initrd.img is under 20MB, so PPC systems can netboot it

How do I get started?

1. set up an F16 chroot

• this is optional for x86 systems but required for ppc
  • see http://sharkcz.livejournal.com/8649.html for detailed directions
  • NOTE: you don't need a separate partition for this - just creating a directory named /f16 will work OK

2. yum install pungi fedora-kickstarts (inside the chroot if you're doing that)

3. Install a copy of the treebuilder branch:

 git clone git://git.fedorahosted.org/git/lorax
 cd lorax
 git checkout treebuilder
 make
 sudo make install

4. Grab a kickstart You can use fedora-install-fedora.ks from the fedora-kickstarts package, or you can use this minimized version if you're not going to build full DVD images:

# Minimal Fedora kickstart - basically just for testing anaconda

# ==== REPOS ====
repo --name=fedora --mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=fedora-16&arch=$basearch
repo --name=fedora --mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=updates-released-f16&arch=$basearch
repo --name=fedora --mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=updates-testing-f16&arch=$basearch
 
# And an extra line in case you have some local changes
#repo --name=localrepo --baseurl=file:///srv/pungi/localrepo --cost=1

%packages
# core stuff that isn't in @base
kernel*
dracut*
# basic groups
@filesystems
@base-x
# size removals
-*-devel
-*-src
-*javadoc*
-xorg-x11-docs
-kernel-doc
-frysk
-*gcj*
-kde*
%end

Save that as /srv/pungi/anacondatest.ks.

5. Run pungi Here's the script I use:

#!/bin/bash
if [ $(getenforce) == Enforcing ]; then
    sudo setenforce 0
    echo "turning off SELinux enforcing"
fi
echo "removing /srv/pungi/test, one moment..."
sudo rm -rf /srv/pungi/test
sudo pungi --nosource --nodebuginfo --destdir=/srv/pungi/test
           -c /srv/pungi/anacondatest.ks -G -C -B "$@"

Troubleshooting

 TODO.

Boot problem 2011-08-05 0000 UTC

Upon boot of DVD, then dracut drops to shell with the message:

 Warning: No root device "live:/dev/disk/by-label/Fedora" found.

The file is present as

 /dev/disk/by-label/Fedora 16 x86_64 DVD

with those three spaces. Reboot with quoting (single, or double, or backslash) also fails. Altering the boot parameter to

 root=ID=ata_SONY_DVD_RW_AW_G-170A

also fails [that name is in my /dev/disk/by-id].