Preparing your own autoyast with custom Suse CD
Suse, for some reason, has to be over-complicated. I don’t really know why, but the time required to perform simple tasks under Suse is longer than on any other Linux distro, and can be compared only to other legacy Unix systems I am familiar with.
When it comes to a more complicated tasks, it gets evern worse.
I have created an autoinst.xml today. It, generally speaking, installs a SLES10.1 system from scratch. Luckily, I was able to test it in a networked environment, so I helped the environment just a bit by not throwing tons of CDs.
Attached is my autoinst.xml. Notice that the root user has the password 123456, and that this file is based on a rather default selection.
Interesting, though, is my usage of the <ask> directives, which allow me to ask for manual IP address, Netmask, gateway, etc during the 2nd phase of the installation. sles10.1-autoinst.xml
This is only a small part. Assuming you want to ship this autoinst.xml with your Suse CDs, as a stand-alone distribution, you need to do the following:
1. Mount as loop the first CD:
mount -o loop /home/ezaton/ISO/SLES10-SP1-CD1.iso /mnt/temp
2. For quick response, if you have the required RAM, you could try to create a ramdisk. It will sure work fast:
mkdir /mnt/ram
mount -t ramfs -o size=700M none /mnt/ram
3. Copy the data from the CD to the ramdisk:
cp -R /mnt/temp/* /mnt/ram/
4. Add your autoinst.xml to the new cd root:
cp autoinst.xml /mnt/ram/
5. Edit the required isolinux.cfg parameters. On Suse10 it resides in the new <CD-ROOT>/boot/i386/loader/isolinux.cfg. In our case, CD-ROOT is /mnt/ram
Add the following text to the "linux" append line:
autoyast=default install=cdrom
6. Generate a new ISO:
cd /mnt/ram
mkisofs -o /tmp/new-SLES10.1-CD1.iso -b boot/i386/loader/isolinux.bin -r -T -J -pad -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -c boot.cat -boot-info-table /mnt/ram
7. When done, burn your new CD, and boot from it.
8. If everything is ok, umount /mnt/ram and /mnt/temp, and you’re done.
Note – It is very important to use Rock Ridge and Jouliet extensions with the new CD, or else files will be in 8.3 format, and will not allow installation of SLES.