[CentOS-docs] Proposed Wiki Edit - CentOS on i586

Sat Jun 4 03:49:02 UTC 2011
Cody Jackson <supertanker13 at gmail.com>

Hi all;

Some of you may have seen on -devel that I've been playing with CentOS
5 on an i586 machine, and several people have displayed interest in
the steps I've taken to compile a kernel and deploy it.

I'm not quite sure where this would best go, so any guidance would be
appreciated. I was guessing that
http://wiki.centos.org/Projects/CentOS5PentiumSupport would be the
best location for the edits, but if you can think of a better place
I've no qualms. The page would go into further detail of the steps
here: http://wiki.centos.org/TimothyLee/centos5_i586_patch plus how to
use Mock to build the packages sanely, how to deploy the i586 packages
to another system without destroying it, etc.

What would be covered is the process I used to:

Modifying the .spec and .config files for i586.
Building the i586 kernel and kernel-devel packages with Mock
Building the i386 kernel-headers packages
Setting up a minimal system on another (>=i686) computer, installing
the kernel, adding any command line options to grub (for me, the
system would not boot without "nomce"), installing openssl.i386 and
glibc.i386, etc.

It looks like the CentOS for the Pentium (and other archs) project
might grow, so the content will probably change very fast, and soon
might be outdated if a bootable i586 image is pushed out the door. In
the meantime, though, I'd like the information where other people can
get it and try it themselves. After all, trying new things is fun!
(TM).

Cheers,
Cody Jackson