debian-installer
I sucessfully created a debian-installer disk with a kernel that has
SE-Linux, EVMS, FreeS/WAN support, and ACL support.
(actually I can't imagine anybody wanting FreeS/WAN to install, but it
might be useful, eg for installing over secure wireless network.... I
can't see any benifit of ACL support in an installer; at least not yet.
Who cares ;-) )
My result is at
<URL:http://www.microcomaustralia.com.au/debian/net-1440.img>.
UDEBS at:
deb http://www.microcomaustralia.com.au/debian/ debian
unstable/debian-installer
(copied from memory).
Also:
deb http://www.microcomaustralia.com.au/debian/ debian
local/debian-installer
Contains a selection of files from the debian archive, I don't guarantee
I will keep this up-to-date though. The only reason I created is is
because of the limitation documented below.
(then again I don't claim I will keep any of this up-to-date, things
change too fast).
I generated this yesterday, so it is possible it is badly out of date
already ;-).
Also, I am just guessing what needs to be done halve the time.
While you can't yet use it to install Debian, I think it clearly shows
what is possible with the modular design of debian-installer.
A future version of selinux-small could, for instance create a
selinux-udeb package which could be used for initially installing
SE-Linux on to the harddisk (I am not yet sure of the details involved).
I just have several comments (sorry if these are already fixed, it is
possible some of the udebs I am using are old).
- the clean target in the build directory doesn't seem to work properly
(more details available on request).
- I had to use UPX to compress the kernel, even now there is not much
spare room on the floppy disk...
- For the net floppy, after entering the download site it doesn't
appear possible to change it for any reason, not even if you got it
wrong and it doesn't work. I had to reboot my computer a few times
because of this.
- For URLs, I really needed the ability to specify multiple websites, so
it would fetch my kernel UDEBs from my website, and other UDEBS from
the Debian website. This didn't seem to be possible.
- There didn't seem to be any checks that the depends fields could be
satisified when installing a udeb package from the network, so I would
get strange errors as a result because essiential programs and/or
libraries cannot be found (eg. depmod).
- It seems pointless listing kernel-modules to download for kernel
versions that are not running...
Some other points which are probably less important at the moment:
- running base install tried to download files from http:///..., which
isn't a valid URL.
- not really easy to tell what the next step is meant to be
installation wise.
Also, my first version kept crashing (my fault; I used a buggy version
of the ACL kernel patch); hopefully this should be fixed now.
--
Brian May <bam@snoopy.apana.org.au>
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