On Mon, 11 Nov 2002, Christopher Mahmood wrote:
- Martin Richard (martin.richard20@sympatico.ca) [021111 16:53]:
Just to know something... I downloaded all the tree for suse 8.1 on my hard disk. I would want to install it and I want to know if is it possible to create a cd set from the tree I downloaded? Can I do it?
Maybe you should have asked *before* downloading? No, you can't really make cds. You can setup a local ftp or nfs server to install from, please read README.FTP
I actually managed to create a bootable install CD for SuSE 7.1. Unfortunately I do not have a precise account of how I did, because when I tested it to see if it would actually run, I continued directly to install it. The installation wiped out the scripts I had made to help in the process. (Yes, I deserve a huge trout-slap for that, I know.) If memory serves me, what I did was: 1 Make a directory tree containing the entire content of all the directories except: suse, unsorted, and dosutils. 2 Create the suse directory. 3 Copy the special directories into my new directory. They are: contents, images, inst-sys, and setup 4 Copy your choice of packages. They must be located in subfolders just like in the ftp directory structure. I found the package selections in suse/setup/descr/, and even managed to create a script to find all the packages I wanted and download them to my directory. (Yes, I only downloaded what I needed.) 4b Look at the size of the directory to see if it will fit on a CD. 5 Create the CD image. Remember to give mkisofs the -b parameter with a relative path from the CD's root to the boot image you will use. 6 Burn. 7a (What I forgot.) Take a backup of whatever scripts you created during this process, and whatever else you might want to keep. 7b Boot and install. 8 Post your experiences here. You may not have room for all the packages you want on just one CD, but I have no idea how to create a multi-CD installation set. I don't even know if this procedure will work with the current SuSE setup. But if it works, you can at least fill out the holes either by pointing Yast towards a fast ftp-mirror and install the remainder from there, or put the rest of the packages on another CD and simply rpm -Ivh * on it afterwards. Regards Ole