[TriLUG] Recommendations for a systemd-less Linux distribution

[William Sutton via TriLUG]

sounds reasonable, other than I don't use lilo and haven't in a decade :-)

alternatively to tgz'ing everything would be to lay down the same 
partition scheme (maybe via cfdisk or some other such copy mechanism) on 
both locations, extract the same Gentoo stage tarball on locations, 
proceed with your build process as you outlined it, and then rsyncthe QEMU 
fs to the new hardware /from/ the new hardware.

William Sutton

On Thu, 16 Jul 2015, Steve Litt via TriLUG wrote:

> On Thu, 16 Jul 2015 07:43:43 -0400 (EDT)
> William Sutton via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org> wrote:
>
>> And if you do want to run a machine with less horsepower
>> (say a laptop), you can always compile on a faster machine and
>> distribute the packages.
>
> Hi William,
>
> For the sake of fast installation, the following has occurred to me,
> and I'd like to run it by you.
>
> 1) Make a Qemu virtual disk whose hardware is, to the best of your
>   ability, similar to the eventual bare metal target. Make the disk
>   "too big" for reasons I'll explain later.
>
> 2) Install Gentoo exactly according to the Gentoo handbook
>   instructions, and get everything working.
>
> 3) Change your partitions around until they're the same as the ones you
>   desire on your eventual bare metal target. Use the extra disk space
>   to make extra partitions. Copy stuff and change /etc/fstab
>   and /etc/lilo.conf (or whatever Grub2 conf if you drive on that side
>   of the street) to accommodate.
>
> 4) Tgz up every mountpoint.
>
> 5) Boot the metal with System Rescue CD, and lay down the desired
>   partition tables and partitions, which match what you did on the VM.
>   Edit /etc/fstab accordingly -- actually, probably just
>   copy /etc/fstab from the VM.
>
> 6) Mount everything.
>
> 7) Untar everything in its correct place.
>
> 8) Do the rain dance for /dev, /sys, /dev/pts, /dev/shm, and /proc.
>
> 9) Mount all disks and chroot to the root partition.
>
> 10) Using lshw (you need to have emerged it on the VM, it takes a
>    *long* time), make sure your devices are what you think they are
>    and are functional.
>
> 11) Make sure /etc/fstab represents the real situation.
>
> 12) Edit lilo.conf to make sure everything is as it should be, then run
>   /sbin/lilo.
>
> 13) Reboot the metal without System Rescue CD. Gentoo should come up.
>    If not, go back to System Rescue CD and chroot and troubleshoot.
>
> I have a feeling the preceding would make a weekend project into a 10
> hour project, but I haven't actually done it. Any thoughts?
>
> SteveT
>
> Steve Litt 
> July 2015 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
> http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21
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