On Tue, 2006-05-23 at 09:57 -0400, Steven Augart wrote:
*snip*
(The motivation here was that FC 5's Anaconda has a bug in it
that
crashes when it tries to find the CD drive on an IBM Blade Center, if
the Kickstart file is on CD. Although I fixed the bug and posted the
URL for the patches, it would be a lot less work, in most cases, just to
work around it by reading the Kickstart file off of a floppy disk.)
This is exactly what a respin would fix =)
However, even though the scripts rebuild the initrd, I was using the
kernel that came with the initrd. I believe that the kernel builds for
the initrd and installer CD are identical to the stock kernel that ships
with FC 5 and is installed. So using the stock one from the RPM should
be safe. If you want to recompile the kernel for some reason, then
the .config file from that kernel is probably pretty safe too.
I know that Hans K. Rosbach (at
http://fedora.isphuset.no/ ) has rebuilt
the Fedora Core 4 installation CD set, with updated RPM packages,
including an updated installation kernel. He calls it "Unofficial FC
4.2". I'm certainly curious to know how he rebuilt the initrd for FC 4
with the updated installer kernel; I myself failed to do it.
http://fedora.isphuset.no/howididit.txt
I haven't commented it a lot, but together with the comments from the
howto I derived it from it should be enough to get you going.
Here's the
story, in case you find it helpful to know about a path that didn't work
for me:
I've been putting together an installation CD for us to use here at Mazu
Networks to install on our Mazu Profiler security appliance (a hardware
box that we sell). We want a single CD that has bundled on it the
Kickstart file we use and all of the packages we want to install. After
I got the FC 5 version working (by fixing Anaconda, as I mentioned
above), we made a technical decision to base the current release of the
product on FC 4.
The problem here is that the distributed FC 4 installer comes with
kernel version 2.6.11-1.1369_FC4. 2.6.11 has a bug in the keyboard
driver which causes a kernel panic when booting on the IBM Blade Center.
2.6.16 doesn't have it. So, before I discovered Hans Rosbach's kernel,
*snip*
Actually my respins contain the official kernel RPM updates, so nothing
should differ from a normal install + updates.
But I am glad to see that I have helped some people.
I am considering making respins for FC5 aswell, but with the lack of
cooperation from fedora or community members it's currently on hold.
-HK