creating minimal boot image for network installations

[Jeremy Katz]

On Thursday, July 16 2009, Dan Hor?k said:
> I don't know about a simple way to start a network installation of
> Fedora from USB stick. Creating of boot.img, that server that purpose,
> was stopped by rel-engs some releases ago. I have found a blog post [1]
> that makes possible to transform a boot.iso image into a bootable USB
> stick. But it still requires to download the 200+ MB large boot.iso file
> and do it by hand, while in theory only initrd.img and vmlinuz files
> should be needed and the whole process could be automated. So I have
> created mkbootimg.sh script [2] that automates all required steps and
> has a bootable disk image as a result. It can be transferred to real USB
> disk by the dd command. I find it useful when testing rawhide
> installations, but can be used for releases too. There is naturally no
> warranty for the script, it can eat whole your system :-)
 
With Fedora 12, you'll be able to just dd the boot.iso onto a USB stick
since we're making isohybrid'd images.

Note that while kernel + initrd is all you "need", not having the stage2
means we have to ask where to find it rather than being able to automate
the use of the mirror list for everything

Jeremy