Re: changing roots on: dpkg -i
On Mon, 2003-12-15 at 09:50, David Z Maze wrote:
> Rob Benton <rob.benton@conwaycorp.net> writes:
>
> > I'm trying to install the xfree86 packages with the /opt directory as
> > root. I've tried using --instdir but the install fails on the
> > pre/postinst scripts. Is there an easy way to do this without having to
> > build my own package?
>
> No. In general, dpkg's options to "change the root" are useful if you
> have a chroot environment, or if you somehow otherwise have a complete
> working system installed somewhere other than / (e.g., you're booted
> off of a rescue CD and your hard disk is mounted on /target or
> something). The best you could do with this approach is install X
> stuff in /opt/usr/X11R6/..., and even that wouldn't work because the X
> server will do things like look for its configuration file in /etc/X11
> (and has, in the Debian build, never heard of /opt).
>
> As far as X goes, IMHO the easiest way to get an XFree86 4.3 X server
> (because that's what you're really after, right?) is to download the
> Xxserv.tgz and Xmod.tgz binary tarballs from xfree86.org, unpack them
> somewhere like /usr/local, and repoint the /etc/X11/X symlink to point
> to them. There are also various backports, plus the ~official Debian
> experimental packages; search the list archives for details. Debian
> in general "doesn't believe in /opt", and relocatable binaries are a
> hard problem that's not real high on the dpkg feature list.
>
> --
> David Maze dmaze@debian.org http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/
> "Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal."
> -- Abra Mitchell
>
Well this is what I have going on. I'm basically building a poor man's
laptop with a usb zip250 drive. I've got just enough to get booted up
but I need X and a java sdk which is too much to fit on 250 MB. So what
I decided I would do is mount some shared memory on /dev/shm and install
the pacakages there. When I get ready to shutdown, tar and bzip up the
files stored there to somewhere on disk. Make any sense?
I downloaded the deb-src of xserver-common to mess around with.
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