*BSD News Article 66572


Return to BSD News archive

Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.bhp.com.au!mel.dit.csiro.au!actcsiro!news.nsw.CSIRO.AU!wabbit.its.uow.edu.au!news.ci.com.au!newshost.telstra.net!act.news.telstra.net!vic.news.telstra.net!news.mira.net.au!news.vbc.net!news.cais.net!van-bc!unixg.ubc.ca!info.ucla.edu!agate!reason.cdrom.com!usenet
From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.org>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: How to make an installation disk..
Date: Tue, 23 Apr 1996 03:00:02 -0700
Organization: Walnut Creek CDROM
Lines: 34
Message-ID: <317CAA22.2F1CF0FB@FreeBSD.org>
References: <1996Apr22.043037.20832@galileo.cc.rochester.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: time.cdrom.com
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0b2 (X11; I; FreeBSD 2.2-CURRENT i386)
To: Jeffrey Kenney <jk002e@uhura.cc.rochester.edu>

Jeffrey Kenney wrote:
> 
> I was wondering if anyone could tell me how to make an installation disk,
> like the boot.flp, I want to put my kernel on it and to make special kernels
> for people with unique configurations.

It's not at all easy, nor will it be easy for some time yet to come
(sorry!).  If someone else were to put the work into making it so, I
would then seriously consider taking that work back into the tree, mind
you, but I do not currently have the time to simplify the procedure
myself.

Basically, if you have about 400MB of disk space lying around, you can
do:

	cd /usr/src/release
	vi Makefile
	  <set CHROOTDIR, BUILDNAME and RELEASETAG as appropriate>
	<make your changes to the floppy build environment>
	make release

This also assumes that you have the CVS repository around and have
CVSROOT pointing to it.

Yes, this is hard.  It was never designed to be used by users, only by
the release engineers.  The release engineers, in turn, have no problems
using it so they don't change it! :-)

For what it's worth, there are quite a few people who've built their own
releases this way - all the components are freely available.  It's just
also not for the faint-of-heart or scarce-of-disk.
-- 
- Jordan Hubbard
  President, FreeBSD Project