Red Hat Enterprise Linux Rebuild mini-HOWTO

1.1. Copyright Information

This document is copyrighted (©) 2003 Michael Redinger and is distributed under the terms of the Linux Documentation Project (LDP) license, stated below.

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In short, we wish to promote dissemination of this information through as many channels as possible. However, we do wish to retain copyright on the HOWTO documents, and would like to be notified of any plans to redistribute the HOWTOs.

If you have any questions, please contact <linux-howto@metalab.unc.edu>

1.2. Disclaimer

No liability for the contents of this documents can be accepted. Use the concepts, examples and other content at your own risk. As this is a new edition of this document, there may be errors and inaccuracies, that may of course be damaging to your system. Proceed with caution, and although system damage is highly unlikely, the author(s) do not take any responsibility for that.

All copyrights are held by their respective owners, unless specifically noted otherwise. Use of a term in this document should not be regarded as affecting the validity of any trademark or service mark.

Naming of particular products or brands should not be seen as endorsements.

1.3. New Versions

The newest version of this HOWTO will be made available on the website of the University of Innsbruck, in a variety of formats:

• HTML.

• PDF.

• Postscript (A4).

• SGML source.

1.4. Credits

Special thanks go to Josep M. (<websurfer AT navegants DOT com>) who sent his description on how to use RHL 7.2 as a build host. I actually did never try this (but the mistakes in this description are, of course, mine).

I would like to thank David L. Parsley for various invaluable hints.

Credits are also due to Red Hat and its really excellent employees for building an "open" distribution. The project described herein would not have been possible otherwise.

1.5. Feedback

Feedback is most certainly welcome for this document. Please send your additions, comments and criticisms to the following email address : <Michael.Redinger@uibk.ac.at>.

2.1. Prerequisites

I assume that you are an experienced system administrator. You should also know how to handle RPM files - this includes installation and (re)building. Otherwise read the RPM HOWTO first.

I strongly recommend that you also read the Burning a RedHat CD HOWTO first. It describes how to build your own "Red Hat" CDs.

Building a server based on RHEL SRPMS is just a special case of what is described in Burning a RedHat CD HOWTO. Therefore I will not repeat the valuable information given in that document. Instead I will only focus on information that is not available therein.

You will also need a build server - see below for details.

2.2. Build Server

You will need a server for building the SRPMS and generate the distribution. I am using a RHEL AS system for this task. This means that you have to buy one RHEL system. However, I thought that this is definitely worth it: I can be sure that my build is very close or almost identical to the "real" product.

As RHEL 2.1 is actually based on RHL 7.2, it is also possible to use RHL 7.2 as a build host.

You should do an "Everything" installation to include all packages (especially libraries and *-devel) that are needed for rebuilding the SRPMS.

If you want to share the created RPMS with other you should include all available languages during installation.

I also highly recommend applying all available RHEL updates. First I thought it should be better to rebuild the SRPMS on a "plain" RHES installation, but I found that this does not work very well.

2.3. Fix Red Hat Bugs

First of all, let me repeat that you have to apply all updates available. Otherwise many packages will not build correctly.

There is a link missing for the gdk-pixbuf include files. If you do not add this link, most GNOME packages will not build:

( cd /usr/include/ ; ln -s gdk-pixbuf-1.0/gdk-pixbuf )

3.1. Downloading the SRPMS

First of all, download the SRPMS for RHEL AS from ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise/ or any mirror. Also download the updated SRPMS from ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/updates/enterprise/.

3.2. Create your build tree

You probably only want to build the latest version of a package - so merge the original SRPMS directory and the updated SRPMS and remove the old SRPMS.

I used updateCD.sh from the rhcd-scripts package mentioned in the Burning a RedHat CD HOWTO. You can get it from the LDP CVS archive.

Unpack rhcd-scripts.tar.gz somewhere on the build server (for example /usr/local/. Now change to rhcd-scripts/rpmvc/ and run make to build the program rvc.

Then create the configuration file /usr/local/rhcd-scripts/rhcd.conf. If the scripts are installed in /usr/local/rhcpd-scripts/, the original source RPMS are in /usr/local/es/2.1AS/i386/SRPMS/ and the source RPMS for the updates in /usr/local/updates/SRPMS/, then the configuration file looks like this:

UPDDIR=/usr/local/updates/
ARCH=SRPMS
RHROOT=/usr/local/es/2.1AS/i386/SRPMS/
OLDDIR=/usr/local/SRPMS.old
CHECKSIG=0
USEGPG=0
RVC=/usr/local/rhcd-scripts/rpmvc/rvc

You also have to create the directory /usr/local/SRPMS.old/. This is the directory the old SRPMS are move to.

Now change to your updates SRPMS directory and remove the files kernel-2.4.18-e.31.src.rpm and mkinitrd-3.4.24-0.ia64.2.src.rpm. These SRPMS are for the ia64 platform only.

There is a bug in the updateCD.sh. Almost at the end of the file there is a comment "Copy new boot image files to the right place ...". The next line is wrong and has to be replaced. Here is my patch:

--- updateCD.sh.orig    2003-07-24 14:35:25.000000000 +0200
+++ updateCD.sh 2003-07-24 15:20:23.000000000 +0200
@@ -139,7 +139,7 @@
 fi
 
 # Copy new boot image files to the right place... (only for 6.x)
-if [ -d $IMGDIR ] ; then
+if [ -n "${IMGDIR}" -a -d "${IMGDIR}" ] ; then
     # directory where the updates have to be copied to
     ANACONDIR=${RHROOT}/misc/src/anaconda
     for bootimage in `ls -rt ${IMGDIR}/*` ; do

Now you can merge the two directories. Change to your rhcd-scripts directory, set the variable for the configuration file and run updateCD.sh:

cd /usr/local/rhcd-scripts/
export RHCDPATH=/usr/local/rhcd-scripts
./updateCD.sh

This worked well for most of the packages. But I found that for some packages the new package was moved to the SRPM directory but the old one was not removed. So you might want to change to your SRPM directory and run the following script to see if you have to move any packages manually:

OLDNAME=""
NAME=""
for file in *.rpm ; do
   OLDNAME=$NAME
   NAME=$(rpm -pq --queryformat '%{NAME}' ${file})
   if [ "${NAME}" = "${OLDNAME}" ] ; then
      echo "${NAME}"
   fi
done

3.3. Rebuilding the SRPMS

Building the RPMS from the SRPMS is actually very easy - simply use rpmbuild --rebuild [file] for all the files:

REPORTS=/usr/local/build.reports
[[ -d ${REPORTS} ]] || mkdir ${REPORTS}
for srpm in *.src.rpm ; do
  rpmbuild --rebuild ${srpm} > ${REPORTS}/${srpm}.out 2>&1
done

You probably want to move the SRPMS that built successfully to another directory. Suppose the SRPMS are in /usr/local/es/2.1AS/i386/SRPMS/. Then make a directory /usr/local/es/2.1AS/i386/SRPMS.done/ and start the build:

REPORTS=/usr/local/build.reports
[[ -d ${REPORTS} ]] || mkdir ${REPORTS}
DONE=/usr/local/src/SRPMS.done
for srpm in *.src.rpm ; do
  rpmbuild --rebuild ${srpm} > ${REPORTS}/${srpm}.out 2>&1
  if [ "${?}" = "0" ] ; then
    mv ${srpm} ${DONE}
  fi
done

You will find the successfully built RPM packages in /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/ (for "i386") and /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/noarch/ (for architecture-independant packages).

rpm -ivh tetex-*.src.rpm

%define enable_japanese 1

rpmbuild -ba /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/tetex.spec

rpm -ivh im-*.src.rpm

rpmbuild -ba /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/im.spec

rpmbuild --target i686 [file]

4.1. Build the distribution directory

Let us suppose you want to use the directory /usr/local/es/2.1AS/i386/ for your newly built distribution. Then you would have to put the RPMS in /usr/local/es/2.1AS/i386/RedHat/RPMS/ (there is a reason for adding "i386" here - it is used by the rpmdb SPEC file). Simply copy all the RPMS to that directory (hint: do not forget the noarch and i686 packages) and set the permissions to 644.

Now you can also build your rpmdb package. Install the SRPM first:

rpm -ivh rpmdb-redhat*.src.rpm

Now rename the SPEC file:

SPECDIR="/usr/src/redhat/SPECS"
mv ${SPECDIR}/rpmdb-redhat.spec.in ${SPECDIR}/rpmdb-redhat.spec

Then edit the SPEC file and add the following lines at the beginning (they should be already there, but they are commented out):

%define rpmdbname               redhat
%define rpmdbversion            2.1AS
%define rpmdbtree               /usr/local/es/2.1AS

Now you can build the rpmdb:

rpmbuild -ba /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/rpmdb-redhat.spec

4.2. Build the installer

When I started working on "rhel-rebuild", I thought this would be the biggest problem. As you know, you must not reuse any part of RHEL but the SRPMS. So I thought it would be necessary to adapt the Red Hat Linux 7.3 installer.

But there is an easy solution for this - Red Hat Enterprise Linux includes a script that generates the installer - including the floppy disk images. Make sure you have anaconda-runtime installed. Then run the following programs:

/usr/lib/anaconda-runtime/buildinstall /usr/local/es/2.1AS/i386/
/usr/lib/anaconda-runtime/genhdlist /usr/local/es/2.1AS/i386/

4.3. Add the comps file

Now you are still missing the file RedHat/base/comps in your distribution directory. Again, see the Burning a RedHat CD HOWTO for a description of what this is all about.

You cannot use the comps file that comes with RHEL 2.1. So I decided to use the comps from RHL .7.2.

This is actually quite easy - you basically just have to remove the packages that are not included in RHEL 2.1. You also have to add a section "Advanced Server" to keep the installer satisfied.

I also added some packages to the comps file that are included in RHEL 2.1 but not in RHL 7.2. Most of these packages are included in RHL 7.3 or RHL 9, so I had a look at these comps too. (If I had to do this again I would probably start with a RHL 7.3 comps file.)

You can download my comps file here: http://www2.uibk.ac.at/zid/software/unix/linux/comps-rhel-rebuild-2.1. Copy this file to /usr/local/es/2.1AS/i386/RedHat/base/comps.

If you change the comps file you should check if there are any problems with it. There is a script included in the anaconda-runtime, check-repository.py, that does exactly this. You have to change one line to make it work. Edit the file /usr/lib/anaconda-runtime/check-repository.py and remove the following line:

import todo

Now run the script:

/usr/lib/anaconda-runtime/check-repository.py /usr/local/es/2.1AS/i386/

5.1. Enjoy!

Well, that is it, folks! Build your installation floppy disc (or boot from CD-ROM, use PXE network boot - whatever) and you are (hopefully) done. Enjoy!