jigdo

John Poelstra poelstra at redhat.com
Sun Apr 27 00:45:57 UTC 2008


Adam Pribyl said the following on 04/25/2008 01:25 PM Pacific Time:
> I appreciate the effort put into preparing jigdo and templates for F9, 
> however I'm bit strugglig what is the purpose of this method. It's maybe 
> great for server side distribution, but it's bit useless without users 
> using it right? As of now, there is no description how to use those 
> cryptic .jigdo file on fedoraproject pages. You can find it only on 
> http://fedoraunity.org/solved/post-install-solutions/jigdo/ and it 
> actually is not a "one click" method (btw: pyjigdo I did not found in 
> repos for F8, or am I wrong?). Would it be worth droping at least note 
> at get-fedora pages what to do with those jigdo files, if we do not have 
> an application to asociate them in web browser?
> 
> Adam Pribyl
> 

Jigdo provides the ability to build ISOs locally by pointing at existing 
packages you already have in conjunction with a jigdo file (which 
provides paths to mirrors to obtain packages which you may be missing 
and a list of the packages needed to build a particular ISO) and a 
template file that provides the basis of the ISO you wish to build.  If 
don't have a majority of the packages locally, in my experience, it 
faster to get ISOs via bittorrent or directly from a mirror.

For example, I keep several days of rawhide (the development) tree 
stored at home.  Recently I needed the first CD of the preview release 
to boot and rescue a broken system.  I could have built the DVD using 
jigdo from my local rawhide tree, but that wouldn't have done me any 
good because I don't have a DVD burner.  Downloading the CDs via 
bittorrent would have taken a long time (3.7G worth) because you get all 
6 CDs at once.

Using Jigdo I was able to build CD #1 locally.  I was missing a few of 
the packages needed and those were automatically retrieved from a mirror.

I agree we need some Fedora specific documentation (if there isn't any 
already).

This page is pretty good as it relates to unity spins and the same 
concepts can be applied to Fedora directly.
http://www.crashcourse.ca/wiki/index.php/Getting_Fedora_respins_with_Jigdo

For starters you want to download one of the .jigdo files
http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/test/9-Preview/Fedora/i386/jigdo/

and then from a command line:
jigdo-lite <file.jigdo>

answer the questions and you are off.

pyjigdo does a similar thing, but I have only tried it once.

I found very little jigdo/fedora help when I first started using it so 
if this doesn't help, post back with your problem and I'll try to help.

John




More information about the fedora-test-list mailing list