YaST/Development/Tools/StartInstall

From openSUSE

Intro

Automates usage of driverdisk to boot a modified installation in qemu:

• qemu supports booting directly from a kernel and initrd, so I could use the http repositories and download those instead of needing a iso.
• I could append kernel parameters telling qemu about them
• I could automatically repack my local directory with updated files and avoid running mkcramfs by hand (latter [Steffen][3] told me I could even use cpio)
• Why bothering with apache in my machine? As qemu can't access the driverdisk image from my local disk, I could start a embedded web server on demand and tell linuxrc about it.

Download

   git clone git://git.opensuse.org/people/dmacvicar/startinstall.git

Usage

The structure of the driver update disk is something like this:

./linux/suse/i386-11.0/dud.config
./linux/suse/i386-11.0/inst-sys
./linux/suse/i386-11.0/inst-sys/usr
./linux/suse/i386-11.0/inst-sys/usr/share
./linux/suse/i386-11.0/inst-sys/usr/share/YaST2
./linux/suse/i386-11.0/inst-sys/usr/share/YaST2/theme
./linux/suse/i386-11.0/inst-sys/usr/share/YaST2/theme/openSUSE
./linux/suse/i386-11.0/inst-sys/usr/share/YaST2/theme/openSUSE/wizard
./linux/suse/i386-11.0/inst-sys/usr/share/YaST2/theme/openSUSE/wizard/logo.png
./linux/suse/i386-11.0/inst-sys/usr/share/YaST2/theme/openSUSE/wizard/installation.qss

In this case, I only want to replace the logo and css file. The important part is the directory with the architecture and version. dud.config has:

UpdateName:     openSUSE 11.0 DUD
UpdateID:       193a399fca4b4da9
UpdatePriority: 100

Which I guess are random values for our specific case ;-) This directory tree is available at /foo/driverupdate on my machine.

Now you need a http or ftp repository (I will add more features later...). In the example, it will be http://distros.foo.com/openSUSE-11.0-RC4-DVD/i386/DVD1

Now just run it:

ruby startinstall.rb --tree /foo/driverupdate http://distros.foo.com/openSUSE-11.0-RC4-DVD/i386/DVD1

startinstall.rb will download the kernel, initrd, pack the driverdisk, start a (webbrick based) webserver offering this driverdisk and launch qemu with the right parameters:

qemu -kernel /tmp/kernel20081030-5149-1yn5upf-0
 -initrd /tmp/initrd20081030-5149-uquvmh-0
 -append 
   "install=http://distros.foo.com/openSUSE-11.0-RC4-DVD/i386/DVD1
    driverupdate=http://mymachine.suse.de:9999/updatedisk20081030-5149-ogaqpl-0 "
 -hda /dev/zero
 -no-reboot
 -net nic,macaddr=00:BE:C3:B9:4C:BD,model=pcnet
 -m 666
 -net user
 -usb -usbdevice tablet

After booting, you will see your modified (see the logo) installation:

References

• Update media howto
• linuxrc docs
• Original blog post for startinstall