problems creating official spins locally

[John Poelstra]

At last week's meeting I volunteered to create a simple wiki page to 
help anyone build one of the official spins and also build some of the 
spins for testing.

I ran into several problems doing this last week.  Some were 
self-inflicted (running out of disk space in the root partition), but 
others were more mysterious.  Like kicking off the livecd-creator, 
watching it download all the needed packages and start to yum install 
them, only to watch it hang on several occasions after installing 400 or 
500 packages.

1) Is building live CDs on Fedora 10 for Fedora 11 a bad idea?

2) Where can I collect troubleshooting information on why the yum 
install process hangs?  Nothing obvious in /var/log/messages

3) What is the best way to cleanly abort a failed/hung live CD creation? 
  I ended up having to reboot my system to unmount the loop devices and 
clean up all the space taking in /var/tmp because killing the process or 
trying to force unmount the loop device didn't work.

Thanks,
John

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 07:02:27 -0700,
  John Poelstra  wrote:
> Is building live CDs on Fedora 10 for Fedora 11 a bad idea?

I thought there were still some unresolved selinux issues. The last I remember
is that you wanted to be on the same version of Fedora and do the build
in permissive mode. I am not sure if all of that is still the case though.

[Kevin Fenzi]

On Mon, 18 May 2009 07:02:27 -0700
John Poelstra  wrote:
> At last week's meeting I volunteered to create a simple wiki page to 
> help anyone build one of the official spins and also build some of
> the spins for testing.

Thanks. ;)
> I ran into several problems doing this last week.  Some were 
> self-inflicted (running out of disk space in the root partition), but 
> others were more mysterious.  Like kicking off the livecd-creator, 
> watching it download all the needed packages and start to yum install 
> them, only to watch it hang on several occasions after installing 400
> or 500 packages.
> Is building live CDs on Fedora 10 for Fedora 11 a bad idea?

I think it is. At least I think you need the livecd-creator from f11. 
Possibly other things. ;( 
I do all my test composes on rawhide machines.
> Where can I collect troubleshooting information on why the yum
>
> install process hangs?  Nothing obvious in /var/log/messages

It would normally be in the livecd-creator output I would think. 
Try -d or -v to it?
> What is the best way to cleanly abort a failed/hung live CD
>
> creation? I ended up having to reboot my system to unmount the loop
> devices and clean up all the space taking in /var/tmp because killing
> the process or trying to force unmount the loop device didn't work.

Yeah, if the mount gets stuck thats your only option. It should
normally clean up after itself once the process dies. ;(
> Thanks,
> John

kevin

[John Poelstra]

Kevin Fenzi said the following on 05/18/2009 08:41 AM Pacific Time:
> On Mon, 18 May 2009 07:02:27 -0700
> John Poelstra  wrote:
> > At last week's meeting I volunteered to create a simple wiki page to
> > help anyone build one of the official spins and also build some of
> > the spins for testing.
>
> Thanks. ;)
> > I ran into several problems doing this last week.  Some were
> > self-inflicted (running out of disk space in the root partition), but
> > others were more mysterious.  Like kicking off the livecd-creator,
> > watching it download all the needed packages and start to yum install
> > them, only to watch it hang on several occasions after installing 400
> > or 500 packages.
> > Is building live CDs on Fedora 10 for Fedora 11 a bad idea?
>
> I think it is. At least I think you need the livecd-creator from f11.
> Possibly other things. ;(
> I do all my test composes on rawhide machines.

Thanks for all the helpful info! I'm trying now on rawhide.

Are there known issues trying to build multiple livecds at the same 
time, sharing the same cache?

John

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 10:25:11 -0700,
  John Poelstra  wrote:
> Thanks for all the helpful info! I'm trying now on rawhide.

You may want to install pykickstart-1.54-1.fc11.noarch from Koji.
I am just about to test to see if it fixes the problems I was having
with the partition --size command being ignored. If you are really just
doing CD sized stuff the 4GB default is probably OK.

[Jeroen van Meeuwen]

On 05/18/2009 05:41 PM, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> On Mon, 18 May 2009 07:02:27 -0700
> John Poelstra  wrote:
> > At last week's meeting I volunteered to create a simple wiki page to
> > help anyone build one of the official spins and also build some of
> > the spins for testing.
>
> Thanks. ;)
> > I ran into several problems doing this last week.  Some were
> > self-inflicted (running out of disk space in the root partition), but
> > others were more mysterious.  Like kicking off the livecd-creator,
> > watching it download all the needed packages and start to yum install
> > them, only to watch it hang on several occasions after installing 400
> > or 500 packages.
> > Is building live CDs on Fedora 10 for Fedora 11 a bad idea?
>
> I think it is. At least I think you need the livecd-creator from f11.
> Possibly other things. ;(
> I do all my test composes on rawhide machines.

Fedora 10 has SquashFS 3, whereas Fedora 11 has SquashFS 4. This is 
incompatible. Fedora 10 might create an ISO with a SquashFS 3 filesystem 
image on it, but the kernel on the ISO will attempt to mount it as 
SquashFS 4 and fail.

--Jeroen

[John Poelstra]

John Poelstra said the following on 05/18/2009 07:02 AM Pacific Time:
> At last week's meeting I volunteered to create a simple wiki page to
> help anyone build one of the official spins and also build some of the
> spins for testing.

I started the page here.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Creating_official_spins

I've successfully built several of them locally and run the games spin 
in a VM.

John