Burning a RedHat CD HOWTO

This document describes how to make your own CDs from different releases of the Red Hat Linux distribution (up to and including release 9), equivalent to the ones commercially available from Red Hat. The structure of the distribution is described, as well as the procedure needed to include updated RPMS into the distribution. Some hints and examples on how to customize the default installation are also presented. Scripts to automate as much as possible the (re)generation of the CD images are included. Prerequisites are a good network connection, and a CD-writer (a working knowledge of shell scripting could be really useful, though).

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

1.1. Disclaimer and License

2. Anatomy of the Red Hat FTP site

2.1. Redhat 9 directories organization
2.2. The "RedHat" directory -- the core of the distribution
2.3. The "updates" directory
2.4. Differences for the 8.0 tree
2.5. Differences for the 7.x tree
2.6. Differences for the 6.x tree

3. RPM packages

3.1. Comparing two versions of a RPM package

4. Obtaining your local copy of the distribution

4.1. Using wget and bash
4.2. Using mirror

5. Including the updates

5.1. Correcting the file protection modes
5.2. Replacing the updated RPMS
5.3. Rebuilding the installer

6. Burning the CD(s)

6.1. Test the image(s)
6.2. Burn the disk(s)

7. The comps file

7.1. Format of comps file in RedHat versions < 6.1
7.2. Format of comps file in RedHat version 6.1
7.3. Format of comps file in RedHat version 6.2
7.4. Format of comps file in RedHat version 7.3
7.5. Format of comps file in RedHat version 8.0 and 9

8. Installing from the CD

8.1. Booting from a bootable CD

9. Other Linux distributions

10. This document...

10.1. Related documentation
10.2. Acknowledgements

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		Introduction