Using Anaconda updates.img on hard disk

[Timothy Murphy]

The Anaconda documentation says that you can
either copy updates.img to a floppy drive
or install in .../RedHat/base ,
and it will automatically be called.

I found that the former worked, but the latter did not.
When I copied updates.img to .../RedHat/base it was ignored.

You may ask why I want to do this.
I have a laptop (Sony C1VFK Picturebook) without floppy or CD drive.
The laptop is currently running RedHat-9.0,
and I want to "upgrade" to Fedora Core.
I have a WiFi connection to my desktop,
and have downloaded Fedora Core test release 2 (version 0.94, IIRC).
The installation fails because of a known bug.

I have installed this version of Fedora on my desktop
by putting severn-test-updates.img on a floppy.
The installation worked perfectly after that.
Unfortunately I cannot do that on my laptop, as explained above.

What I did was to "decompose" the iso image with
mount -o loop ...disk1.iso /mnt/cdom
make a "proper" copy of this with
cp -a /mnt/cdrom /fedora
copy severn-test-updates.img to
/fedora/RedHat/base/updates.img
and "remake" the iso image with
mkisofs -R -o ...disk1.iso /fedora

I should say that I abstracted bootdisk.img from the ISO image,
decomposed it with "mount -o loop"
copied the resultant files to /boot/fedora
and added a grub pointer to these,
so that I could boot into the Fedora release.

The new ISO image worked exactly like the old one,
but encountered the same bug at the same point,
ie the updates.img seems to have been ignored.

I looked briefly at the anaconda sources,
but I am not an expert,
and could not see where (in loader2/hdloader.c)
this updates.img file was accessed.

I'd be very grateful for any suggestions or advice.
Has anyone successfully implanted updates.img in RedHat/base/ ?
Is there another way of achieving the same aim?

I did wonder too, although I am not an expert in these matters --
could I have modified the anaconda sources, recompiled them,
and replaced the new version in the ISO image?
Or could I have modified the bootdisk?
I could not really work out how the bootdisk interacted with anaconda.

-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail: tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
(all email over 80k dispatched to /dev/null)
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland