Tech/omsa livecd

From DellLinuxWiki

Fedora includes the useful tool livecd-creator, which can generate a LiveCD. These are instructions on how to build your own LiveCD containing the Dell OMSA software suite, running on top of CentOS 5 i386.

Note: If you publicly redistribute your image, honoring the open source licenses of the packages in CentOS, you must provide copies of the source code for all open source / Free software components included in the LiveCD.

First, have a Fedora 7 i386 system handy. Then install livecd-tools.

# yum install livecd-tools

You may need a patch here for building CentOS images: https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-livecd-list/2007-July/msg00142.html

You need a kickstart file, dell-omsa51.cfg. An example file is at http://linux.dell.com/files/revisor/dell-omsa52.cfg.

The package list doesn't include all the Dell firmware images, as that would push the size up over 700MB. But, if you're going to burn it to a DVD, or to a USB key, feel free to add to the %packages section:

system_bios*
pci_firmware*

Now, run livecd-creator, and wait...

# export OMIIGNORESYSID=1
# livecd-creator --config=dell-omsa52.cfg

When that finishes, you'll have a bootable LiveCD image you can use. Burn that .iso image to a CD, boot that CD. Note OMSA starts up during system startup, and you can start Firefox going to http://localhost:1311.

In addition, you can use livecd-tools to turn that LiveCD into a Live USB key. Plug in a USB key, unmount any file systems from it that are auto-mounted, and run:

# livecd-iso-to-disk livecd-*.iso /dev/sdb1

replacing the ISO name with the one just generated above, and the mountpoint of the partition of your USB key, which will already contain a VFAT file system. This will not erase the files on your USB key except for the syslinux and Live system directories.