[Fedora-livecd-list] Unable to overide package/group selection

[Tim Wood]

I have a kickstart that includes the xfce kickstart (which includes
fedora-8-base-desktop), I'm trying to add samba-client (which is removed
by fedora-8-base-desktop) and remove the language groups (added by the
xfce kickstart). For instance (pardon me if I mistype the package/group
names):

samba-client
- at zulu-languague-support

Those lines are ignored. The only way I've found to make the changes I
want is to actually modify the original kickstarts. The behavior I would
expect is that each kickstart could overide anything in an included
kickstart. I'm using the latest livecd-tools in fedora 8 updates rather
than the git version. So I'm either reporting a bug or reporting
something that's been fixed in git...

Tim





Douglas McClendon wrote:
> Jeremy Katz wrote:
>> After long periods of waiting and hoping, etc I'm just about to do a
>> push of some changes that at least give us a good base to build on for
>> persistent live images. They're very very very heavily based off of
>> Douglas McClendon's patches that he posted here a month or two, but I've
>> done basically two things with them:
>> 1) Integrated the findoverlay bits into mkliveinitrd directly and was
>> able to do a little bit of cleanup accordingly
>
> No general objections. As I look at it more, I'm sure I'll start
> submitting some patches for mkinitrd.
>
>> 2) Not put in the bits right now to do the snapshot teardown on shutdown
>
> No objections. I admit, that I also have not witnessed a failure,
> since some kernel improvement maybe half a year ago seemed to make it
> crash-proof. But of course it should do the right thing to shutdown
> cleanly. But I agree that can be deferred for now.
>
>> The former is pretty non-controversial. The latter, well, we're going
>> to need some testing to know how feasible this really is. I spent quite
>> a while this afternoon trying to cause any form of corruption without
>> the initscripts changes and never succeeded[1]. And realistically, if
>> it's going to cause corruption if we don't shutdown cleanly, then we
>> have problems if someone loses power or removes their USB key or any of
>> a whole bunch of other things occur. I _did_ have the journal get
>> recovered and as long as things were able to get to the journal, it was
>> good to go. But more testing is going to be needed. So if anyone here
>> wants to try building some images and putting them on USB drives and
>> testing them out, that'd be greatly appreciated. And then I'm going to
>> issue a larger call for testers with the Fedora 9 beta. If we find that
>> we need to integrate some of the shutdown bits, we'll make it happen.
>> But right now, I'm feeling pretty confident that we won't
>>
>> The quick steps of how to take advantage of the functionality:
>> 1) Build a live image using the newer mkinitrd (6.0.32) in your repos
>> 2) Use the updated livecd-iso-to-disk.sh with an --overlay-size-mb=512
>> (or 1024 or whatever based on the capacity of your USB stick minus the
>> size of the ISO)
>
> and minus whatever space you want for other stuff on the liveusb. I
> see plenty of interesting uses of LiveCD/USBs with this feature, and
> the writable area. I haven't yet looked at what Jeremy actually
> merged, but the LiveUSB host filesystem (typically vfat) will be
> accessible under /mnt/overlayfs. I think in the LiveUSB case it is
> also /mnt/live.
>
>> 3) Boot the USB drive
>>
>> You can also (although it's more complicated) use a USB stick with a CD
>> 1) Build live image as in 1) above
>> 2) Create /LiveOS/overlay-$v- on your USB stick with size how ever big
>> you want (can be a sparse file). $v is the label of the _iso_ (not of
>> the USB stick)
>> 3) Find the label or UUID of the partition on the USB stick you're
>> using. Write it down.
>> 4) When you boot the CD, have the USB stick plugged in and add to the
>> kernel command line
>> overlay=$dev
>> where $dev is what you found in step 3. If it's a label, do LABEL=foo;
>> similarly uuid ==> UUID=foo.
>>
>> Big big big thanks and kudos to dmc for doing all of the legwork here
>> and letting me off the hook for so long on actually getting it
>> integrated. But once I finally got around to having a full afternoon to
>> spend on it, it was in great shape.
>
> Thanks, and no problem. Of course, now I/someone really need to put
> together a brief overview/faq page, to especially drill in the
> mechanism, and set expectations appropriately given the mechanism
> (i.e. as with ram for the livecd, creating and deleting files is not
> currently handled as ideally efficient as one would like).
>
> But given the appropriate expectations, I expect to see it end up
> being useful in a lot of situations. And I am sure that in the future
> the feature will improve over this initial functionality.
>
> -dmc
>
>
> -- 
> Fedora-livecd-list mailing list
> Fedora-livecd-list at redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-livecd-list
>


-- 
_________________________________
Tim Wood, CLP, RHCT
719.338.7484 (tel)

The Data Wranglers
Web, Database & more since    since 1994
www.datawranglers.com