Miles O'Neal wrote:
> Paul,
> 
> I've not looked into sites yet, though it's
> been on my list for a while.  And 586 support
> may become crucial to us soon; we were going
> to replace these but I'm fight budget battles.
> Do you have a list of what you did to get
> those working?
> 
> I didn't group reply, but the list may be
> interested as well.
> 
> Thanks,
> Miles


I will try to reconstruct what I did to install SL 3.04 on an i586 PC.
By comparing with CentOS 3.4, which does support the i586 and is largely 
compatible with SL, I discovered that the necessary i586 packages that 
were missing were

	kernel-2.4.21-27.0.2.EL.i586.rpm
	kernel-unsupported-2.4.21-27.0.2.EL.i586.rpm
	glibc-2.3.2-95.30.i586.rpm
	nptl-devel-2.3.2-95.30.i586.rpm

(You can probably do without the last package.)

The easiest thing to do is to create a modified install tree on a 
machine that can act as a nfs server (ftp or http should also work).
I mounted each of the SL iso images and copied their contents into one 
directory thus:
	mount -o loop,ro SL.304.050305.i386.disc1.iso /mnt/disc1
	cp -a /mnt/disc1/* /install_path/304/i386/
(the same for disc2,...,disc4).

Next I downloaded the missing i586 packages from a CentOS mirror and 
copied them to the SL/RPMS directory in the install tree.

Now the necessary packages are in place but it turns out the installer 
doesn't "see" them unless some files in SL/base/ are rebuilt. The most 
essential of these are pkgorder, hdlist and hdlist2.

The necessary scripts for rebuilding these can be found in 
SL/build/scripts/. I made the following changes to the locations.include 
script:

	VERSIONDIR=$VERSION
	RELEASEDIR=/install_path/$VERSIONDIR
	ARCH=i386

Next you need to run the build.hdlist.sh script. For this you need to 
have the anaconda and anaconda-runtime packages installed. To make sure 
the pkgorder file is rebuilt it is probably best to remove it before 
running build.hdlist.sh. I needed to make some modifications to the 
build.hdlist.sh script because the version of genhdlist executable I was 
using wasn't entirely compatible (the --default option needed to be 
replaced by --productpath), but this may not be necessary in your case.

I created boot floppies from images/bootdisk.img and images/drvnet.img 
and used these to do a network install on the i586 machine.

Everything seems to work normally, although some boot up script kept 
complaining that my machine wasn't supported because I didn't have 
enough memory. I could make it shut up by removing /var/lib/supportinfo.
I had to take into account that resources were limited on this old 
machine, so I disabled many services and installed icewm instead of 
gnome or kde.

You can use yum to do updates, except for the kernel, glibc and related 
packages. These need to be downloaded and installed separately. To make 
sure yum doesn't mess with these I added the following line to yum.conf:

	exclude=kernel* glibc* nscd* nptl*


I described only the minimal changes necessary to do an install. If you 
want to do more customizations or make your own CDs I suggest that you 
look at the files in SL/build/scripts/, SL/base/scripts/ and read 
http://www.linux-magazine.com/issue/51/Red_Hat_Custom_Install.pdf .

I hope this has been helpful to you.

-- 
Paul Rombouts