Sunday, September 14, 2008

What's Wrong with Fedora Revisor (Sep 15 08)

Revisor is the Fedora package that allows you to create your own installer CDs/DVDs/USBsticks that include the latest versions of packages available at the time of creation of the installers. The original Fedora-9 installer DVD:

http://ftp.cse.yzu.edu.tw/pub/Linux/Fedora/releases/9/Fedora/i386/iso/Fedora-9-i386-DVD.iso

was made available for download on May 8, 2008, and included the latest Fedora packages as of May 8, which includes Linux kernel version 2.6.25-14. If you used Revisor today, you could create an updated Fedora installer DVD with all the latest versions of packages as of today, and will include Linux kernel version 2.6.26.3-29 which is the latest version of the kernel available from a mirror site:

http://www.gtlib.gatech.edu/pub/fedora.redhat/linux/updates/9/i386.newkey/kernel-2.6.26.3-29.fc9.i686.rpm

When I was using Fedora-8, Revisor worked perfectly, and I could generate updated installers for Fedora-8 regularly, on a monthly basis if I wanted to. Now that I am using Fedora-9, I could not get Revisor to work anymore. First, there was this inability of Revisor (or yum) to macro-replace the variables $releasever and $basearch in the *.repo and *.conf files in /etc/yum.repos.d and in /etc/revisor/conf.d. So I manually did the macro-replacements, making sure that every occurrence of $releasever was replaced with "9", and every occurrence of $basearch is replaced by "i386" or "x86_64", depending on which system I am running Revisor on. So Revisor was successfully able to download the all the packages or their latest updates. I reached up to the point when Revisor is now creating the iso images of the installers, and at this point the programs mkisofs and implantisomd5 both exit with errors, and the installer CD/DVD is not created. I googled these Revisor errors, and the various Revisor fora do not mention these problems at all.

If you are working with Revisor for Fedora-9, I would appreciate it if you could point me in the right direction, and help me solve my problem. Thanks.

1 comment:

MacAdmin said...

Yep, i'm stuck with revisor on FC9 too :(
Seems to be the problem is with updates-newkey.
U've found that a version of Revisor from GIT contains the needed repositories changes already.

I'll try to compile revisor from source.....