Re: Rebuilding minimal install iso RHEL 4 (U1)

[Michael Stiller <ms 2scale net>]

On Thu, 2005-10-06 at 12:23 -0500, Aleksandar Milivojevic wrote:

> My definition of "standard utilities" is a basic stuff needed for 
> sysadmin. Couple of shells (so that scripts work), stuff like grep, 
> find, ls, kill, ps,
> basic vi editor, sed, awk and so on.  Manual pages shouldn't be part of
> minimal.  Log rotation stuff would be in nice to have category 
> (requires cron).
> Ethernet is de-facto standard for LAN, so it is the only networking 
> that should
> be there by default (wireless, ppp, pppoe, and so on are always easy to add as
> needed).

I strongly agree with that. The minimal stuff should be that packages
only, that let the system boot and enable basic lan networking. 
All other tools anyone needs, may easily added later. 


> Currently you get at least Base + Core, which is way too bloated, and it looks
> to me that majority of people share that opinion.

I just tried that packages --nobase switch on RHEL 4.0 U2 and it breaks.
The packages-installation screen looks very strange (e.g. -3 packages to
go etc.) See below. If you install with %packages only you'll end with
about 284 packages using 688Mb. No comment on that.


> The question is, should the Core be cleaned even more, or majority of people
> really need everything that is inthere?

If it is reasonable and small enough there is no need to clean it even
more. 

On Thu, 2005-10-06 at 11:17 -0700, Joshua Daniel Franklin wrote: 
> The first (the install/rescue CD) has very few RPMs on it (and some
> strange ones!):
> [RPMS]# pwd
> /ISO/4as/disc1/RedHat/RPMS
> [RPMS]# ls
> anaconda-product-4-2AS.noarch.rpm             inn-devel-2.3.5-12.i386.rpm
> arptables_jf-0.0.8-2.i386.rpm                 radvd-0.7.2-9.i386.rpm
> caching-nameserver-7.3-3.noarch.rpm           redhat-release-4AS-3.i386.rpm
> comps-4AS-0.20051001.i386.rpm                
> system-config-boot-0.2.7-1.i386.rpm
> freeradius-1.0.1-3.RHEL4.i386.rpm            
> system-config-netboot-0.1.32-1_EL4.i386.rpm
> freeradius-mysql-1.0.1-3.RHEL4.i386.rpm      
> system-config-nfs-1.2.8-1.noarch.rpm
> freeradius-postgresql-1.0.1-3.RHEL4.i386.rpm  TRANS.TBL
> freeradius-unixODBC-1.0.1-3.RHEL4.i386.rpm    vsftpd-2.0.1-5.EL4.3.i386.rpm
> inews-2.3.5-12.i386.rpm                       ypserv-2.13-5.i386.rpm
> inn-2.3.5-12.i386.rpm
> [RPMS]# du -h
> 14M	.
> 
> I'm not sure what exactly is in the initial images, though, that might
> be enough.

Thats what i also mentioned. You actually need to change cdroms twice if you want
a minimal install. During "minimal" only the redhat-release rpm is installed from the first iso.
Sorry but this makes no sense to me. The "minimal" e.g. Base and Core and maybe Dialup RPMs
should be on the first disk.

Later today i'll try to reduce the comps.xml file to some minimal packages and
try to rebuild the distro like mentioned at http://people.redhat.com/rkeech/custom-distro.txt

> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=139364
> 
> Thanks, this is helpful info.

Thanks to Aleksandar, this is really helpful. 

On 10/6/05, Joshua Daniel Franklin <jdf lists gmail com> wrote:

(%packages --nobase)

>I had a chance to try this, and it works OK. There are still a lot of
>packages that could be excluded, but it looks like if you want to
>use up2date (requires python) and signed rpms (requires gnupg,
>which requires perl) you need almost all of them.

I tried this to and it failed:

http://2scale.net/ms/dsc00025.jpg
http://2scale.net/ms/dsc00026.jpg
http://2scale.net/ms/dsc00027.jpg

The stacktrace shows kudzu is missing. I'll add it now...

Ok this works. The ks.cfg is like this now:

...
%packages --nobase
kudzu

%post
rpm --import /usr/share/rhn/RPM-GPG-KEY

Result:
http://2scale.net/ms/dsc00028.jpg

cheers,

-Michael