[Fedora-livecd-list] some lessons learned

Tim Wood tim.wood at datawranglers.com
Sun Oct 7 20:37:20 UTC 2007


I've finally gotten everything working again.  In the process, I've  
discovered several things.  Hopefully I'll save someone else some  
serious heartburn in running this down.  The resemblance to FAQ stuff  
is semi-intentional and meant as much for people googling for answers  
as anything else...  I'm working with livecd-creator now, but I  
suspect most the stuff below applies equally to Revisor.


--------
MBR Errors

I discovered that I was having problems with known good LiveCDs.   
Repeat to self, verify that the hardware (or virtual hardware...) is  
working before throwing your keyboard.  For instance, test a known  
good LiveCD ( a Fedora respin, Knoppix and Berry Linux are all good  
tests).  If that won't boot, the problem isn't livecd-creator/ 
Revisor.  In my case, some combination of these steps solved the  
problem:
1) Updating to the latest version of VMware (for these purposes, a  
reinstall)
2) Running the configuration script for VMware again
3) Choosing RedHat 4 when setting up the virtual machines (for  
testing, for instance) instead of other linux/2.6 kernel


--------
What's a valid repo

Fedora 7 appears to use sqlite-based metadata.  The files in the  
repodata directory seem to be filelists.sqlite.bz2,  
other.sqllite.bz2, primary.sqlite.bz2.  The respository errors I've  
been running into were because versions of createrepo older than  
roughly 0.4.7 don't generate that data and Fedora 7 doesn't (ever?)  
fall back to the older metadata formats.  My repository runs on a  
CentOS install and is maintained by dag's mrepo.  If someone is  
running some variant of this combo:
1) Download a current version of createrepo (I'm using 0.4.10 from  
http://linux.duke.edu/projects/metadata/generate/) and build it  
(rpmbuild --rebuild)
2) Current versions of createrepo require yum-metadata-parser ...  
which is in the CentOS 4 testing repository.
3) To generate the metadata, run createrepo with the --databases  
flag.  For mrepo, edit mrepo.conf and add a line with: "createrepo- 
options = --databases"


--------
Rawhide, git and a heaping helping of patience

Third, continuing with my (d'oh that's obvious in hindsight lessons),  
Rawhide (the latest testing version of Fedora) and a build of livecd- 
tools (or Revisor) from git is an exercise in combining whatever  
good, bad or ugly development code has been checked in the last 24  
hours.  One or both may be really broken and don't be surprised if it  
doesn't work the first (or second or...) time you try.


--------
A recipe to get the darn thing to work

I believe several people (including myself) have been asking how to  
get a working machine for livecd creation.  The process I went  
through to get a working Fedora 7 livecd creator
1) (optional) create a virtual machine as detailed above
2) Install Fedora 7
3) update with yum update
4) install livecd-creator: (sudo yum install livecd-tools)
5) change a config file (/usr/share/livecd-tools) so that the repo  
lines point at a repository with sqlite-based metadata (see above for  
how to spot this)
-- it's worth noting that livecd-fedora-minimal.ks is the fastest way  
to verify everything is working
-- at a minimum you'll need the os RPMs (or the development one?)
-- as an example of the repo line:
----> repo --name=f7 --baseurl://192.168.2.100/mrepo/fedora7-i386/ 
RPMS.os
-- "No Repositories Available to Set up" came up twice for me.  I'm  
starting to suspect this really should say:
----> "Repository XYZ does not have sqlite-based metadata and won't  
be used"

---------
So when does some crazy person start a fedora-livecd faq...

I'm still curious about anything of substance on whether livecd- 
creator (and thus, presumably Revisor) use other config files (like  
yum's) to decide where to find repositories.  Anyone know?




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