Re: Integrate Knoppix in Debian (was: Re: Debian Enterprise?)
Niall Young <niall@chime.net.au> writes:
> On Mon, 1 Dec 2003, Anthony Towns wrote:
>
> I don't particularly care what tools we use, as long as we minimise
> duplication of effort - fai seems the obvious choice for defining
> flavour/custom subsets of Debian, and is a good install method for now.
> Everyone else seems to be concentrating on their own initrd solution,
> and Debix sounds like the way to go if it's multi-arch (didn't realise
> it was). Mandated debconf with pre-seeding or some kind of db proxy
So far i386 and alpha and m68k is struggeling on the kernel-image
needed. Too repeat some deatils, debix uses the device mapper support
of the linux kernel to make a read-only device (loopback file)
transparently writable (copy-on-write to a ramdisk/tmpfs). Unless one
of the archs of linux has no support for loopback files, ramdisks
or device-mapper that I'm not aware of all archs are suported. With
2.6 device-mapper is in the vanilla kernel which will make things even
easier.
> allows us to perform non-interactive installs, I guess this will become
> a greater priority as d-i matures. At the moment any interactive package
> configuration can halt fai and requires workarounds. Live CDs could
> also contain an fai server installation to replicate themselves to disk,
> eventually d-i using the same type of debconf/class defintions. That's
> just where I see it going, I wish I had more spare time this year to
> have taken it further.
Since the live filesystem is a device-mapper device it can be moved
around on-the-fly while its being used. Installing means activating a
device-mapper device on the harddisk partition (dmsetup /dev/hda1
table_file) and then starting the device-mapper move task to move the
data to disk. After the move the initrd for harddisk boot has to be
created and the bootloader has to be installed.
That would be true replication and no reinstallation of itself.
MfG
Goswin
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