Ok: This is a great start for information. Any comments on updating the RPMS so that they get installed on the first pass? - Mike On Sun, 25 Jun 2000, W.D.McKinney wrote:

Date: Sun, 25 Jun 2000 16:28:09 -0800 (AKDT) From: W.D.McKinney To: mike@universe.ne.mediaone.net Cc: suse-linux-e@suse.com Subject: Re: [SLE] SuSE 6.4 pre-install question

This FAQ will help ....http://www.suse.de/~grimmer/FAQ/SuSE-Linux-E-FAQ-4.html

"Michael J. McGillick" wrote:

...

Evening:

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On Mon, 26 Jun 2000, Lenz Grimmer wrote:

Date: Mon, 26 Jun 2000 17:04:09 +0200 (CEST) From: Lenz Grimmer To: suse-linux-e@suse.com Subject: Re: [SLE] SuSE 6.4 pre-install question

Hi,

On Sun, 25 Jun 2000, Michael J. McGillick wrote:

...

I'm downloading the latest SuSE (6.4) to my hard drive at the moment. I would like to ask a few questions before installing it on my machine.

First, I come from a Red Hat background, and am familiar with how Red Hat lays out their CD to do an install. SuSE is a little different in that it appears to offer a lot more.

Yes, that might be true. Unfortunately we did not do a very good job on documenting this :(

Well, it's something I'm sure can be worked on for future releases. If you need folks to get involved, just give a hollar. I'd be happy to test beta versions and give feedback in areas that in my opinion might be improved by tying things a different way. I'm hardly an expert when it comes to Linux, but I have seena few distributions, and like and dislike facets of each. Let me know if I can help :)

...

Normally, when Red Hat released updates, and I wanted to build a new install CD, I went to the directory where the RPMS where, replaced them with the updated or new RPMS from Red Hat's site, and then I need to run a small utility program in the release to update the package listing for the next time I wanted to do an install.

Hey, that sounds neat. Is there any documentation about this somewhere?

After many countless failed attemtps, and searching through the CD, asking questions, etc. the answer surfaced. Basically, on the Red Hat CD, they include a directory called misc, which is where, it appears, they keep most of the C source code for the utility programs they use, distribute etc. One of the programs there is called genhdlist, and when you run it, you give it the root directory. It then looks in the specified directory where the RPMS are stored and generates a list. What this allows the end user to do is download the Red Hat cd, add any updates from Red Hat's site, throw in any of thier own favorite RPMs, run genhdlist from the root directory to generate a new file listing, and then create and image of the top level directory so it can be burned to a CD. Voila, instant custom Red Hat distribution with your favorite stuff added in.

...

How does this work with SuSE? I noticed that SuSU has released security updates, patches, enhancemnets, etc. Do I just replace the existing packages with the new ones, and install as normal, or is there some master list that needs to be updated before I actually do the install. I would like to save myself a little bit of time by installing all of the latest stuff the first time.

I just asked one of our Gurus about this. If the package still has the same name, it should be sufficient to simply replace the RPM with the updated one. It might be, that YaST's package description and disk use estimation might be wrong because this information is stored on separate files on the CD. But it should basically work like this.

...

Next, is there a document that describes the file structure layout for SuSE. I'm not sure, but I believe Red Hat is not 100% strict when adherirng to the proposed directory layout for a standard Linux machine. I've heard that SuSE is very good with regards to this. Any leads?

Thanks for the positive comments :) We try to adhere to the FHS wherever possible, which is documented here: http://www.pathname.com/fhs/ Some more info about SuSE specifics can be found in the manual, which is available as a PDF file as well.

Thanks for the lead on this document, and appreciate the welcome. :)

Bye, LenZ

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