Arch Linux

rz

Member

From: Jita

Registered: 2012-01-11

Posts: 17

Website

[SOLVED] mkinitcpio portable?

Hello friends, I am wondering what I would need to do to use mkinitcpio on another distro.  Is the code fairly portable or are there are Arch-isms I need to be aware of?

I'm trying to do a "Let's Play" kind of thing with installing distros and mkinitcpio seems like an easier solution than doing everything manually.

tia

Last edited by rz (2012-01-31 09:20:47)

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There's 52 ways to murder anyone. One and two are the same and they both work as well.

ngoonee

Forum Fellow

From: Between Thailand and Singapore

Registered: 2009-03-17

Posts: 7,358

Re: [SOLVED] mkinitcpio portable?

Best to ask on arch-general. Better yet, take a look at the source? No guarantee that those responsible would be checking the forums.

More to the point, I'm not sure how mkinitcpio would help with most other distros since presumably they would install their own ramdisks for post-GRUB handling.

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Allan-Volunteer on the (topic being discussed) mailn lists. You never get the people who matters attention on the forums.
jasonwryan-Installing Arch is a measure of your literacy. Maintaining Arch is a measure of your diligence. Contributing to Arch is a measure of your competence.
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rz

Member

From: Jita

Registered: 2012-01-11

Posts: 17

Website

Re: [SOLVED] mkinitcpio portable?

Well I'm trying to use it to write out a friendly-ish method to install exherbo with all the nice things: systemd, lvm on luks, grub2, etc.  Everything else I can describe in short, easy-to-understand (I hope) blurbs.  But getting the initrd to boot the lvm+luks is turning out to be its own chapter.  I would rather just say "mkinitcpio will bundle up everything the kernel needs to successfully boot into an initrd file."

I will download it and poke around then.

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There's 52 ways to murder anyone. One and two are the same and they both work as well.

rz

Member

From: Jita

Registered: 2012-01-11

Posts: 17

Website

Re: [SOLVED] mkinitcpio portable?

Ok, I poked around in mkinitcpio.  It is quite tied to Arch as much of its functionality must be provided by the packages such as lvm2 and cryptsetup and even filesystem.  Also the initrds it makes are slow.

FWIW exherbo has dracut in its base repo.  It's very nice and makes excellent initramfs they are fast.  Also used by Fedora and Red Hat it is very nice. 

Thanks for the diversion dudes.

PS. dracut is very nice.

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There's 52 ways to murder anyone. One and two are the same and they both work as well.

ngoonee

Forum Fellow

From: Between Thailand and Singapore

Registered: 2009-03-17

Posts: 7,358

Re: [SOLVED] mkinitcpio portable?

Seems you've solved it yourself, perhaps you can append/prepend [solved] to your title to keep things clean?

PS - you COULD contribute to mkinitcpio to speed it up if you wanted

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Allan-Volunteer on the (topic being discussed) mailn lists. You never get the people who matters attention on the forums.
jasonwryan-Installing Arch is a measure of your literacy. Maintaining Arch is a measure of your diligence. Contributing to Arch is a measure of your competence.
Griemak-Bleeding edge, not bleeding flat. Edge denotes falls will occur from time to time. Bring your own parachute.