producing a customised distro...

[Oisin Mulvihill]

Hi,

I'm trying to reduce the number of disks I need to use, to install a
set of internet kiosks I have developed based on fedora. Currently
I have my own kickstart file on a special fedora core one disk. It
then chooses the packages I need off disks one to three. I then have a
fourth disk that installs my software and turns the pc into a kiosk.

I'm moving to fedora core three and now the amount of disks I need is
up to five. I want to reduce the amount of disks down to two if 
possible.
The fedora os install plus my stuff on a second disk.

I've followed the advice I was given a while ago, and looked at
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/AnacondaBuildDocProject and
http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/anaconda-installer/. I've also
trawled through news groups on how to do this.

My problem is I can't seem to get "getnotincomps.py" to work and tell
me what rpms I don't need. It just keeps producing key errors. I've
tried just try-excepting the key error to see how far it gets. But
every package causes the problem. I thought this was a problem with
how I did my stuff. However when I tried to produce a distro based on
the original comps.xml and fedora core three information, I find it
doesn't work either. I've also found that the original stuff seems to
be missing packages that aren't on the disks either:

<snip>
:
CRITICAL ERROR: Unable to find package redhat-logos
CRITICAL ERROR: Unable to find package compat-libgcc-295
CRITICAL ERROR: Unable to find package compat-libgcc-296
CRITICAL ERROR: Unable to find package compat-libgcc-32
CRITICAL ERROR: Unable to find package compat-libstdc++-295
CRITICAL ERROR: Unable to find package compat-libstdc++-296
CRITICAL ERROR: Unable to find package compat-libstdc++-32
:
</snip>

In my custom version I just commented out these problem areas. I 
presumed
if it was a problem with the original its not something I have to worry
about. I realise that this is a head-in-the-sand approach.

Presumably someone on here has successfully made a single disk install,
and has come across this problem. Alternatively can anyone give me a
procedure I can follow that will do this. One that goes into more detail
then the wiki. The wiki seems to lightly cover the important bits you 
can
have problems with. A lot of what goes on in producing a distro seems to
border on voodoo magic.

I've already asked this question on this list under the subject
"Customising fedora problems..." with no response. However I'm at a 
complete
dead end and can't get any further. I suppose there isn't really a 
problem
of sending my technicians out to install kiosks with five disks, I was 
just
hopping, that because this was linux there'd be a better way. I don't 
need
most of the stuff and the things I do, seem spread across the disks.

I appologise if this email isn't any clearer the my last attempt, but 
any
help on this would be greatly appreciated,

Thanks,

om

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