making a custom hoary-based LiveCD with a custom kernel

[Luke Yelavich]

On Mon, Jul 11, 2005 at 11:03:10PM EST, Maarten de Boer wrote:
> Yes, the 2.6.12-rt-preemt kernel I created was built using the
> 2.6.12 Ubuntu kernel packages, with make-kpkg --initrd. I installed
> the resulting linux-image-XXXXX.deb in my LiveCD, and copied it
> (gzipped) into /install on the LiveCD before running mkisofs. I
> suppose that is enough?
> 
> $ gzip -c /mnt/extracted.new/boot/initrd.img-2.6.12-rt-v0.7.51-13-686 > /mnt/custom-live-cd/install/initrd.gz
> 
> But I can imagine that the LiveCD needs a different initrd than
> an installed system?

Yes it does need a different initrd. The initrd on the live CD has 
various components of the Debian Installer in it, to allow for selecting 
of languages, and auto-detecting where the CD drive is, and mounting the 
cloop filesystem. Your initrd will not bring up the necessary bits to 
do that, and will fail.

In order to modify the initrd, you will probably have to grab the source 
of debian-installer from the repository, and change it to include your 
kernel. This also involves creating your own local repository with your 
packages in it, and having to point the debian-installer build process 
to it to use them.

You will also have to build kernel udebs, that contain individual 
modules for various drivers, as well as an udeb for the kernel itself. 
AFAIK, the only real way to generate these udebs is to build an entire 
sireies of kernels from the 2.6.12 kernel sources, that you obtain with 
the apt-get source command.

I have probably missed something, but as I am looking into much the same 
thing, this is what I have learnt so far. The debian-installer manual 
has this info in it as well, so you might want to look at that as well. 
I would also say that Colin may comment on it at some point as well.

hth
-- 
Luke Yelavich
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