libguestfs RPMs for RHEL 5.3 (was: Re: [fedora-virt] libguestfs on non-Fedora targets)

Richard W.M. Jones rjones at redhat.com
Thu May 7 19:40:06 UTC 2009


I'm just uploading RPMs of libguestfs that I built for RHEL 5.3 i386
(actually CentOS 5.3 + EPEL).  You will be able to get them here:

  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/libguestfs/files/RHEL-5

in around 60 minutes time.

You absolutely must read the README file and follow the instructions
there.

There are four issues which I know about at the moment, and probably a
few others.  The package does however pass all of the C API tests,
which is generally a good sign.  The issues are:

(1) On RHEL 5, IDE devices are called '/dev/hd*', whereas on Fedora 11,
IDE devices are called '/dev/sd*'.  This means that any call which
takes or returns a device name, and there are many such calls, must
use the /dev/hd* form, eg.

  guestfs_list_partitions (g);
  ==> [ "/dev/hda1", "/dev/hda2" ]

  guestfs_pvcreate (g, "/dev/hda1");

This is annoying if you are writing scripts that must work on both
versions of RHEL (5 & 6).  You have to first call guestfs_-
list_devices, and from that you can tell the format of devices names
that the current version uses.  If you look in the main() function of
'tests.c' in the source, you can see some code which does this, so
that the tests can run using both formats.

(2) RHEL 5 didn't support FUSE or NTFS-3g.  So unfortunately you may
not be able to read Windows (NTFS) partitions.  This is a matter of
backporting the relevant code to EPEL.  I haven't yet worked out how
hard that is going to be.  (Note there may be other ways around this,
such as using the in-kernel NTFS device driver).

(3) You need to compile your own recent qemu and provide a qemu
wrapper for it.  See the README for more details.

(4) There is no Augeas support in this version.  (Bug in febootstrap).

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
New in Fedora 11: Fedora Windows cross-compiler. Compile Windows
programs, test, and build Windows installers. Over 70 libraries supprt'd
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW http://www.annexia.org/fedora_mingw




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