Bug 117956

Summary:	Alternative bootstrapping method
Product:	[openSUSE] SUSE LINUX 10.0	Reporter:	Guido Trotter <ultrotter>
Component:	Installation	Assignee:	Gerd Hoffmann <kraxel>
Status:	RESOLVED WONTFIX	QA Contact:	Klaus Kämpf <kkaempf>
Severity:	Enhancement
Priority:	P5 - None	CC:	suse-beta
Version:	unspecified
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	Other
OS:	All
Whiteboard:
Found By:	Other	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---

Description Guido Trotter 2005-09-20 07:53:39 UTC

It would be nice to be able to easily bootstrap a suse system from within
another linux installation. Other distribution that support this are gentoo
(manual bootstrapping from one of their stage files is their default
installation method) debian and ubuntu (through debootstrap).

In practice there should be a script, or a tarball to uncompress, or some other
easy way to create inside a directory a base suse system with everything needed
to continue setting it up simply by chroot()ing inside it. This should be doable
downloading things from the network only inside the target directory, or in some
other way that doesn't clutter the original installation and doesn't require
rebooting or setting up network servers, etc.

This is really important for users of virtual machines (xen, uml, linux-vserver)
that may want to install and use a virtual suse from their "main" linux and
cannot reboot it for the installation, in order not to stop other running hosts.

It's nice that suse supports xen and supports bootstrapping itself in a chroot
if you already run suse, but this should be easy to do even if you are using
another distro...

PS if there already is a way, then my wishlist is that it should be documented
inside the "advanced" installation methods...

Comment 1 Ladislav Slezák 2005-09-21 06:40:34 UTC

There are already some scripts which can be used for creating a system image.

Package uml-utilities contains /usr/bin/uml-install-suse script (system
installation, see the man page), xen-tools package contains
/usr/share/doc/packages/xen/mk-xen-rescue-img.sh script (creates an image based
on the rescue system image).

Comment 2 Ladislav Slezák 2005-09-21 13:23:31 UTC

I got this reply via mail:

I couldn't find a way to add an additional comment, on this bug bugzilla's page.
Anyway those two scripts shipped inside a suse package are not a full soultion,
because they work only inside a suse system with one of those two packages
installed. IMHO there should be a simple script (or something) which can be
downloaded from the suse website and made to work on any distribution (debian,
fedora, gentoo, ubuntu, ecc) that is able to install suse in a chroot, not only
something that works by previously installing a suse package (which could be a
non-option...)

Comment 3 Ladislav Slezák 2005-09-21 13:24:48 UTC

Gerd, can you make the scipt available via web or ftp?

Comment 4 Gerd Hoffmann 2005-09-22 07:45:44 UTC

It is available from http://www.suse.de/~kraxel/uml/ as well (will have to
update it, I think that version hasn't yet the tweaks for xen included).

That wouldn't help for the non-suse distri case though, the script runs on a
suse system only anyway. It depends on the yast2 package manager shell (y2pmsh)
to get its work done.

At the moment there is no such thing like debootstrap for suse, although I agree
that it would be nice to have ...

Comment 5 Lars Marowsky-Bree 2007-02-19 17:37:53 UTC

WONTFIX