[uml-devel] helping toward UML 1.0 (??)

[Mattia D. <mal...@li...>]

Hello Jeff, Paolo,

Sorry for the long mail, I hope it's not too boring ;)

I re-packaged (together with Stefano Melchior and Andreas Schuldei) the
user-mode-linux kernel[1] and uml-utilities[2] and I'd like to help with
the issues listed on u-m-l.sf.net pages related to Debian.
Firts of all: are all those issues still outstanding?

Hmmm... they seem to be there since a long long time.
Anyway here's some comments:

===========================================================
My attempts to run the Debian install procedure hung UML...
===========================================================
It's working now, I'm installing from debian etch beta2 netinst[0].
Procedure: extract the initrd.gz from the iso image downloaded at [0] (I
tested the 2.6 flavour in /cdrom/install/2.6/) and run UML with

linux ramdisk_size=12000 mem=128M umid=debian initrd=initrd.gz \
      root=/dev/ram0 ubd0=my_rootfs ubd1=debian-testing-i386-netinst.iso \
      eth0=tuntap,,,172.20.0.1

I'm using uxterm to run this as the installer interface relies on UTF8
chars to draw correctly.

BTW: current Debian user-mode-linux package unfortunately is missing
some important config options to run an initrd, I'm planning to upload a
new revision very soon to fix that.

==============
Packaging debs
==============
You can find most of the info on the page at [1]. We are currenlty
carrying a few patches[3] to comply to the FHS and Debian policy,
namely:
  * 02_fix_install_directories (uml-utilities)[4]:
    1- don't use lib64 in Debian, we have a symlink lib->lib64 (I'm no
       multiarch expert but I'd say debian implements it differently from
       FHS)
    2- install uml_net into /usr/lib/uml to comply FHS 4.7.1
       somewhat discussed with a proposed patch to add /usr/lib/uml the
       the $PATH which we're already building binaries with.
    3- install tunctl in /usr/sbin as it's a root-only executable
  
  * 01_uml_net (uml kernel)[5]:
    see point 2 above, the same patch has been posted here and currently
    is in Paolo's tree (thanks!)
    
  * 02_x-terminal-emulator (uml kernel)[6]:
    1- run the x-terminal-emulator link instead of plain xterm to
       respect user configured default x-terminal.
       This is a debian only patch.

========
Manpages
========
We have a manpage (linux (1)) that is some kind of big blob of
historical and current uml command line options more or less derived
from linux --help and the u-m-l website.
Ever seen it? [7] or [8] as plain text

====
Docs
====
We are also carrying the user-mode-linux-doc package which is
essentially the u-m-l website. It needs updating (last update iwas
05.23.2002) but I was wondering if it makes some sense to still keep
them as I also read there's some wiki effort in place to replace the
website.


[0]: http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
[1]: http://packages.qa.debian.org/u/user-mode-linux.html
[2]: http://packages.qa.debian.org/u/uml-utilities.html
[3]: http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/pkg-uml/trunk/src/?rev=0&sc=0
[4]: http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/pkg-uml/trunk/src/uml-utilities/debian/patches/02_fix_install_directories.dpatch?op=file&rev=0&sc=0
[5]: http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/pkg-uml/trunk/src/user-mode-linux/debian/patches/01_uml_net.dpatch?op=file&rev=0&sc=0
[6]: http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/pkg-uml/trunk/src/user-mode-linux/debian/patches/02_x-terminal-emulator.dpatch?op=file&rev=0&sc=0
[7]: http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/pkg-uml/trunk/src/user-mode-linux/linux.sgml?op=file&rev=0&sc=0
[8]: http://people.debian.org/~malattia/docs/linux.1.txt

bye
-- 
mattia
:wq!