I installed F11 x86_64 from the DVD. I did a minimal install using
only the base and development groups because I have several thousand
extra packages I like to install. Usually I do them via script, but
decided to try something different this time around in order to make
the process faster. I had heard about pungi and kickstart, and they
sounded like the way to go.
First I decided to try pungi. The goal was to create an iso on a hd
partition that would not be affected by the F11 install and use it to
install all the packages I wanted via a kickstart file. i.e. no size
restriction as it would never go to media but be mounted directly off
the hard drive. Pungi seemed perfect for this. I could copy the vmlinuz
and initrd off the F11 DVD and put them in my master boot directory that
wasn't changing, put an entry in grub pointing to them with askmethod,
and start the install. I had downloaded all the rpms from a mirror and
had them in a directory. I used the kickstart from the F11 install as my
basis for the kickstart fed to pungi. And I was doing this from within
F11 itself, as required. Eventually, I fiddled around until I got
pungi to create an iso but I could never actually get it to include the
packages that I had in the packages section of the kickstart. I tried
different options -C, -I, but it seems that pungi can only work with
source packages and I had only the official distribution rpms to
include. It isn't clear from the documentation whether the rpms have
to be in a repository or not so I tried it both ways. It didn't choke,
and it gave no errors, and the iso created looked fine, but nothing I
did would include them. Here is the basic command I used:
pungi --config=/mnt/home_base/f11-ks.cfg --name=Fedora --ver=11
--fulltree --selfhosting --cachedir=/mnt/home_base/localrepo
--destdir=/mnt/home_base/pungi_f11_iso --nosource --nosplitmedia
--force -I
This was trying with a repo instead of a directory of files. I noticed
that the format of the repo created by createrepo is different that
that of the official repos in /var/cache/yum. Maybe that was the
problem.
When that didn't work, I tried a longshot of creating a kickstart file
that pointed to the packages, then rebooting with the vmlinuz and
initrd from the F11 dvd as described above. (To copy the vmlinuz and
initrd files, mount the F11 install DVD locally and copy them.
mount /mnt/r2s1/home/stan/dl/iso/Fedora-11-x86_64-DVD.iso /media/dvdr
-t iso9660 -o loop)
This is the boot record to put in grub
title Fedora 11 install
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-f11-install askmethod
initrd /initrd-f11-install.img
It started fine and I could have pointed to the F11 DVD iso and
installed again, but nothing I did could make it use the kickstart file
I had defined to reinstall F11 with all the packages I wanted. I tried
using several different styles of URL with no result. It wanted an
ISO, and that was that. I tried using ks=sdb2/f11-ks.cfg with no
success either.
In the end I used a script to install the packages in chunks. There
were file conflict errors in the packages, and --skip-broken didn't
seem to work for them, with that whole chunk of installs being
scrapped. I found this out by trying a single yum --skip-broken
install on all the files. Several hours wasted. :-(
So, is there a way to make the pungi method work? Or can I just take
the guts out of the F11 install DVD, put the packages I want into the
packages directory, put my kickstart file someplace in there, make an
iso file system using makeisofs (doesn't have to be bootable as the
boot record in grub takes care of that), and boot from the iso. I
didn't try this because there are so many unknowns the combinatorics of
trial and error become defeating. If so, how?
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