Rinse bootstrap

Official website: http://www.steve.org.uk/Software/rinse/

Rinse is a simple tool which is designed to carry out the installation of a new RPM-based distribution. Rinse is currently supported several distributions:

• centos-4
• centos-5
• fedora-core-10
• fedora-core-4
• fedora-core-5
• fedora-core-6
• fedora-core-7
• fedora-core-8
• fedora-core-9
• opensuse-10.1
• opensuse-10.2
• opensuse-10.3
• opensuse-11.0
• opensuse-11.1

To install and use this software you'll need several dependencies:

• rpm & rpm2cpio
• perl : to unpack the RPM packages

Some usefull options from rinse:

• Customization Options:

      --add-pkg-list        Additional packages to download and install
      --after-post-install  Additionally run the specified script after
                            the post install script.
      --before-post-install Additionally run the specified script before
                            the post install script.
      --post-install        Run the given post-install script instead of the
                            default files in /usr/lib/rinse/$distro

• Misc Options:

      --arch                Specify the architecture to install.
      --cache               Should we use a local cache?  (Default is 1)
      --cache-dir           Specify the directory we should use for the cache.
      --clean-cache         Clean our cache of .rpm files.
      --config              Specify a different configuration file (Default is /etc/rinse/rinse.conf)
      --pkgs-dir            Specify a different directory containing
                            <distribution>.packages files.
      --list-distributions  Show installable distributions.
      --print-uris          Only show the RPMs which should be downloaded.
                            default files in /usr/lib/rinse/$distro

So in a computemode context, to install a computemode server, we can use this kind of command:

# sudo rinse --arch amd64 --distribution centos-5 --directory ./

It is also possible to add more distributions:

# ls /etc/rinse/
centos-4.packages        fedora-core-15.packages  fedora-core-6.packages  fedora-core-9.packages  opensuse-10.3.packages  rinse.conf
centos-5.packages        fedora-core-4.packages   fedora-core-7.packages  opensuse-10.1.packages  opensuse-11.0.packages
fedora-core-10.packages  fedora-core-5.packages   fedora-core-8.packages  opensuse-10.2.packages  opensuse-11.1.packages

We just have to add a configuration file containing a package list to be installed into the chrooted environment and to configure the mirror installation into the /etc/rinse/rinse.conf file.

Note: all repositories into the /etc/rinse/rinse.conf file seems to be deprecated but we can easily find some other mirrors.