Baslinux mailing list

[James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>]

On Thu, 1 Apr 2004, Sindi Keesan wrote:

> I also discovered that you cannot boot with BL2 ramdisk and use installpkg
> to install packages easily to the hard drive BL2.  First, BL2 ramdisk has
> no installpkg (which is a script).  So I tried /mnt/sbin/installpkg to
> install a package and it could not find /var/log/packages and quit.
> I could possibly rewrite the script to /mnt/var/log/packages.

I think you might need to chroot to do this: I think Steven said chroot
works in BL.  To do that, mount your HD BL install somewhere on the
ramdisk you've booted to - say at /hd.  Then, do chroot /hd .  Once you do
that, you'll be logged in and functioning as root in the BL filesystem on
the HD (don't ask me much about how this works: I can sort of feel my way
through it and have read about it and done it before, but am not real
clear on exactly how it works).  You should be able to use installpkg or
any other installed progs/libs on the system installed on the HD using
that technique.  Again, I'm going on the recollection that Steven said
recently that chroot'ing works under BL

> While hunting for library downgrade help, I ran across the fact that mc
> can be used to look at the files inside an rpm package and copy over just
> the ones you want.  Has anyone tried this?  mc/mc-menu did not work for me
> to install a couple of rpm packages, said they were the wrong format or
> something similar.

If you install the full-blown MC from Slack, it should be able to do this:
it should have installed all necessary dependencies (e.g., file
compression/uncompression utils, its mailcap or whatever it uses to find
the progs it needs for certain operations) etc.  I use the full-blown MC
on my Debian system to do this sort of thing all the time - real handy.
If you want to use the slimmed down version of MC from, say, JP's site,
you'll have to do some manual tweaking and related package install to get
that working.

James