Re: make-kpkg
On Friday 16 May 2003 19:44, Kevin McKinley wrote:
> On Fri, 16 May 2003 07:50:06 -0400
> I'd like for the doc to be as useful to as many people as possible, so it's
> especially valuable to get detailed feedback from those whom it didn't
> help.
>
> Now that you've made it through, can you look back and see exactly where
> the newbiedoc was not useful to you?
It contains nothing that is not useful. It is remarkably readable and clear.
When I encountered errors I found that it was because I failed to follow the
instructions exactly or completely. I'll tentatively say that the exception
to this lies in the matter of the --initrd option (see below).
>
> Can you think of better ways to explain the things you didn't understand?
1) I'd like to see config options for eliminating initrd in the form of
OPTION_BLAH=Y for the case of IDE drives and both ext2 and ext3 file systems.
Alternatively, a link to another document on this topic would be useful. I
agree with the author's dictionary's description of initrd being "one more
thing to worry about". I'll go though my config and extract the options that
I think worked for me. I changed so many things that I've lost certainty
over which exact option changes eliminated the need for initrd.
2) I have not gone back to test make-kpkg with the --initrd option yet. I am
assuming for now that this is the magic bullet that I needed.
I did my testing on a freshly installed Debian 3.0 stable system loaded with
the "Simple" option and the following additional packages:
ssh, nfs-common, manpages, man-db, apt-utils, the stuff from section 2.2
(bash:~# apt-get install gcc kernel-package kernel-source-2.4.18 libc6-dev
tk8.3 libncurses5-dev fakeroot) except fakeroot cause I didn't use it, vim,
g++-2.95, cvs, and ntpdate
It's a lean system. I access it through ssh only.
I have to build more similar systems this week. I'll use the make-kpkg
compile again and post here the results of using the --initrd option. I
expect to see some sort of initrd image that I'll use in the vmlinuz stanza
of /etc/lilo.conf as follows:
initrd=my_image
3) If this document is intended for newbies, then a trouble-shooting section
offering suggestions would be nice. It is truly amazing to me how much help
one can get by Googling on the _exact_ error or panic message. Putting this
advice into one of those boxed alerts might be a worthy addition.
In conclusion I want to tout the value of make_kpkg .deb outputs. The .debs
are valuable if you need to rebuild your system, or if you need to build
multiple similar systems.
--
Mike M.
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