FC6 - Teaching A New Dog Old Tricks

[Net Llama!]

On Fri, 5 Jan 2007, Leon Goldstein wrote:
> Net Llama! wrote:
> <snip>
>
>> An idea that no one has suggested, and might be the best long term
>> solution (unless you really enjoy hacking WP8 into place every time a new
>> distro comes out, or praying that the old crusty distro still works on
>> ancient hardware which might fail eventually anyway), is to use a chroot.
>>
>> Take your working filesystem image where WP8 works fine, and use dd to
>> create a fileystem image in a file.  Then you just move/put that
>> filesystem image in any other distro (FC6, SuSE-10.2, etc) , mount it over
>> loopback, chroot into the mount point, and run WP8.
>>
>>
>>
> I have thought of something along those lines; installing an old Linux
> that is hospitable to WP along with a contemporary release.
>
> I get most of what you suggest, although I'll have to research the
> meaning of "mount it over loopback"  since I have never done that.  (I
> have used chroot to salvage data from an unbootable drive onto a CD
> using Knoppix.)
>
> Could I  coax you into writing a little more detailed how-to?

Sure, its actually simple.
0) Install whatever distro works well with WP8 
on 1 harddrive, with just a single / partition (nothing separate for /usr 
/home, etc) with the smallest / partition possible
1) Once you're 
comfortable that WP8 works fine there, either connect a 2nd HD to the WP8 
system that is at least as large as the first, or make sure that the WP8 
system is networked to whatever other system you want to ultimately use 
(such as the one with FC6).  What you need to do here is use dd to take an 
image of the WP8 / partition and either write that image as a file to the 
2nd HD.  Or use the FC6 system as NFS server, mount it from the WP8 box, 
and then dd the image to the NFS server
2) So for the dd command you'd do:
dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/nfs-mountpoint/wp8.img bs=10k
3) Then once you've got the wp8.img on the target system (FC6), you just 
mount it over loopback:
mount -o loop wp8.img /mnt/wherever
4) chroot into it:
chroot /mnt/wherever
5) and run wp8


I've done this before for a project at $DAYJOB which required me to use 
SuSE-10.1 for a single task, once/month.  I was sick of maintaining a 
system just for 15 minutes worth of work once a month, so I just imaged 
the drive, dumped it on my primary system (which has FC6), and now life is 
easier.


-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lonni J Friedman                        netllama at linux-sxs.org
LlamaLand				http://netllama.linux-sxs.org