Creating customised linux iso

[srtm2001]

hi all, i have a customised fedora iso and i want to include an upgrade option in that because right now i can only install the OS from scratch. What i am looking for is to boot from dvd and will get a menu asking for clean installation or upgrade. On choosing upgrade it should mount the root file system and upgrade the rpm's. Any tip will be helpful.

[Irithori]

Why does it have to be a update from CD?

It is much simpler to just use
yum update
and all the updates come from a fedora repository.

What does "customized" mean?
If you built your own RPMs, then the best option is to install your own repository with your rpms in there.

[srtm2001]

I work for a company and by customized i meant we have few of our own rpm's, we removed the fedora logo's ....etc. Actually what we looking for is the way for customer's to upgrade from older to newer version of os as we keep on releasing updated version every six months. At the moment customers want to upgrade have to do clean installation as there is no upgrade option when booting from dvd.

[Irithori]

personal opinion: bad plan

Suppose a remote-exposeable bug in i.e. openssh comes up.
So, while fedora and the other distros would produce updated packages in the next days,
your customers would have to wait 6 MONTHS?
Thanks, but no thanks

Also, that "boot from CD, mount the root partition and update the system"
will not work.
Just think of that: a customer decides to have /var on another partition.
(which is a good idea, btw)
You mount only root, rpm needs /var for its DB and cache -> update will fail.

It's perfectly ok to update a running system, given some maintenance window
and restarting the updated daemons.
Reboot, if kernel and/or glibc are updated.


And if you dont want to setup a http repository for your RPMs and insist on CD,
this can be done also:
Howto Setup yum repositories to update or install package from ISO CDROM Image


Another note:
You might have less work, if you leave fedora packages as they are.
This way, you can use the fedora repos and dont have to work to keep "your" system RPMs uptodate.
So there is more time for the RPMs, that you actually *do* create on your own.

[srtm2001]

Initially what I am thinking to do is:
1) Prepare a boot message that show either upgrade or install option on booting from dvd.
2) When customer select upgrade mount the root file system and run rpm -qa > rpmlist.txt
3) Remove unnecessary stuff sed -i s/-[0-9].*// rpmlist.txt
4) cd to rpm dir on dvd and run
cat /path/to/rpmlist.txt | for X in *.rpm; do rpm -Uvh --aid $X; done
to upgrade rpms on root file system

Now the problem is how I don know how to execute first two steps...??

How the upgrade process works on standard linux distribution's, you can upgrade from dvd's for instance fedora 10 to 11.....etc

[Irithori]

fragile plan.
Like I said before,
- a DVD every 6months is way too slow
- that bootable DVD would need logic to mount all needed partitions

rpm -qa and then sed?
This approach is better: rpm -qa --qf '%{NAME}\n'
But equally pointless.
Why?
There is already a tool to keep RPMs updated. yum.
And it works.

What is the point of a "update DVD"?
Make your repo available (http or DVD)
Use yum on a running system to update.
Problem solved.

[srtm2001]

....oh well thats my "Boss's" plan.
I believe customers already apply updates using yum at the moment, but he really wants an upgrade path using dvd too as currently we don't do that, just for the sake of having the ability to do so.

[srtm2001]

well i found that i can create a kickstart file with upgrade option in it...which supposed to upgrade the existing distro and configure the isolinux.cfg to point to kickstart file and edit boot.msg to show upgrade option on bootup from dvd. After all this now the error i am geeting is

"anaconda did not find any partitions that are valid upgrade candidates"
any suggestion??