[Fedora-livecd-list] livecd-creator problems/questions

[Jeremy Katz]

On Sat, 2007-09-15 at 19:38 -0400, Chris Hubick wrote:
> 1) Note that if the path to the tmpdir is too long, /sbin/losetup -a will
> truncate the path in it's output, and livecd-creator will fail (after
> tweaking, mine above is *just* short enough).

dmc just sent a patch for this and I pulled it in, so this should be
resolved in the next release.

> 2) I want a pure x86_64 system with no multilib.  It took me some time to
> figure out to include --exclude=*.i?86 on the repo line in my kickstart
> file.  Is that the best way to do this?

Either doing that or 
  -*.i?86
in your %packages section are the way to go.  The difference is with
your approach there is _no_ way the package will get pulled in and you
could end up having the build fail due to broken deps.  But if you want
to be absolutely certain there are no x86 packages, then that's probably
more what you want.

> 3) Is there any way to find out the final list of packages for a kickstart
> file after dependency resolution against a given set of repositories?
>
> I keep tweaking my kickstart file to get things to fit within the required
> size, but somehow I mistakenly add a package with a million dependencies
> I didn't know about, and livecd-creator then goes to download them all.
> It would be nice if there were an option, or separate tool, to print a
> list of packages for approval first, or at least a summary and size?

Not right now -- it could be relatively easily added, but that brings to
mind questions for me of how you present it.  Presenting the list of
~850 packages isn't going to be something which you can easily scroll
through and say "yes, this is good".  And size is also tricky as finding
the final size really requires the install + compression pass.  

We could potentially give an estimate of the installed size minus the
compression.  But then I wonder if you want a prompt or a
--dont-do-if-larger-than=size-MiB debug option.  

> 4) How do I build a LiveCD based on a specific (stableish) test release
> (7.91)?  Given two repos:
> 
> repo --exclude=*.i?86 --name=f8t2 --baseurl=http://fedora.mirror.iweb.ca/development/x86_64/os/
> repo --exclude=*.i?86 --name=f8t2 --baseurl=http://fedora.mirror.iweb.ca/releases/test/7.91/Fedora/x86_64/os/
> 
> The first one will work, but the second will fail, because the release
> folder doesn't contain all the same packages (ie, rdesktop) (why)?

Given that we don't do the "everything" tree for test releases, it's a
bit tricky, unfortunately :(

> 5) /usr/share/livecd-tools/livecd-fedora-desktop.ks has a directive:
> %include livecd-fedora-base-desktop.ks
> 
> Where is that include file located?  With the Fedora 7 setup examples,
> everything is in the one kickstart file, and easy to reference, but I have
> no idea how to find that information now?

It was (mistakenly) not installed by the Makefile.  You can grab it from
git[1] or it'll be in the next build.

> 6) How do I customize what user is created, auto-login, etc?  That used to
> be in the bottom of the kickstart as well, but is gone now?

It's in the base-desktop config.  The idea being that -desktop (and
-kde) inherit from the base config and have the same bits there so
copying and pasting is for the lose.

> 7) Is there any easy way to tell what is being downloaded and how fast?
> As it stands now, I have to browse into the tmpdir with Nautilus and
> watch.

What's being downloaded will be shown as of the next livecd-tools build
thanks to a patch from Colin.  Not sure if we can really get rate from
urlgrabber easily.

> 8) I waited hours while it downloaded my packages, and then finally I came
> back to see this error:
[snip]

This means there isn't enough space in the root filesystem.  The default
rootfs is 4 gigs.  If you want larger (or smaller), you can add a line
  part / --size 8192
or whatever to your config.  I just committed a change to make this more
explicit in the config.

> 9) It deleted everything it downloaded!  Gah!  How do I stop this?

You can now pass a cachedir to use with --cachedir=/path/to/my/cache and
it won't get deleted.  That said, you'll want to be extremely careful in
doing so as multiple runs can stomp over each other as there's no
locking of the cache.   

Jeremy