Constantinos Galilei wrote:

On Wednesday November 4 2009 3:31:23 am Bogdan Cristea wrote:

...

Is there any application for creating a basic file system for Linux ? Ideally I need something allowing to specify the platform type (e.g. x86, ARM, etc.).

What would specifying the platform type do? The file system doesn't care about platform type and, as far as I know, doesn't keep that information.

He means a populated filesystem, not the empty container which is also called a filesystem. His terminology was admittedly vague, but not wrong. The fault lies in the language more than his use of it. The collection of files that make up an installed system, without the hardware that also make up that system, are also called "a filesystem". There are several ways depending on just what sort of system the OP actually wants. A live usb stick image? A xen or other full virtualization guest image? A lxc or other container guest? The shortest recipe with the least manual interaction I've managed within opensuse, using opensuse tools to create an opensuse system in a subdirectory is: mkdir -p /v/0 zypper -R /v/0 ar -f http://download.opensuse.org/factory/repo/oss/ oss zypper -R /v/0 in -lt pattern base (*** If someone has a shorter, or more non-interactive, method I'd like to hear it so I can improve the LXC notes I started on the opensuse wiki. If anyone knows anything about using LXC, please help create some documentation there too, there is really none at all right now, even though lxc is a built-in kernel feature now and the re is a nice rpm of the lxc userspace tools in 11.2, just no opensuse specifoc docs and no opensuse version of the debian and fedora bootstrap scripts. http://en.opensuse.org/Virtualization_Resources_for_SUSE_Linux#LXC http://en.opensuse.org/LXC ***) Another way is to just cheat and grab one of the already existing OpenVZ template systems which are basically hand crafted tar files of a "system" that's ready to run as a container, which is a wierd case in that the virtualized system doesn't really have a boot loader or real devices or even vritualized devices (/dev nodes) it just runs processes in the host kernel directly. None of the system installers has options for creating a system like that currently so such systems have to be somewhat made by hand, starting from a basic "real" install, then paring out the stuff that doesn't apply.in that context. Other ways are available on other systems: http://blog.mudy.info/tag/mkarchroot/ http://wiki.debian.org/Debootstrap http://www.xen-tools.org/software/rinse/faq.html Then theres also kiwi for creatimng livecd/usb images. Or, just launching qemu or kvm and running an ordinary installer to install to a usb stick as it it were a regular machine with a regular hard drive. -- bkw -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Bogdan Cristea wrote:

On Wednesday 11 November 2009 17:21:11 Brian K. White wrote:

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There are several ways depending on just what sort of system the OP actually wants. A live usb stick image? A xen or other full virtualization guest image? A lxc or other container guest?

I am trying to use qemu for embedded systems development, so I was looking for a full virtualization guest image. I have found debootstrap, but the filesystem is too large for my needs. Another option would be busybox, but I still don't know how to manually create the filesystem structure and the required files needed to boot a linux image.

Well one crude way is just let the normal installer do it the same as it would for a hard drive. Just create an empty file and run the install dvd in qemu. wget http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.1/iso/openSUSE-11.1-DVD-i586.is... dd if=/dev/zero of=minifs.img bs=1M count=1024 qemu -m 512 -boot d -hda minifs.img -cdrom openSUSE-11.1-DVD-i586.iso If the minimal text-only install option still requires more than 1G, then increase count=1024 to 2048 or 4096 or whatever is required. -- bkw -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org