Bugzilla – Bug 117956
Alternative bootstrapping method
Last modified: 2007-02-19 17:37:53 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...
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).
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...)
Gerd, can you make the scipt available via web or ftp?
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 ...
WONTFIX