This page answers to both frequently asked questions and frequently anticipated questions.

1. Software Requirements

To use rinse you will need the following binaries installed upon your system:

• rpm & rpm2cpio - To unpack the .rpm files.
• wget - To download from remote servers.

These should be readily available upon Debian/Debian-derived distributions via "apt-get install rpm". Distributions which support the RPM format natively shouldn't have them installed already.

2. Supported Distributions

The distributions which may currently be created are:

• Centos 4 & 5..
• Fedora Core 4, 5, 6, & 7.

Each distribution is supported as both 32-bit/i386 and a 64-bit/AMD64 flavours.

3. How are these distributions installed?

The installation, or bootstrapping, of the new operating system occurs in two parts: First the minimum number of packages required to create a working yum command re installed. Then this newly installed copy of yum is used to install itself.

Why this two-step process?

Downloading the packages required to create a working yum command should be sufficient. (For example any shared libraries, python libraries etc). However if you stop there you'll end up with a minimal working system but the local yum+rpm databases will not match the packages which are actually installed.

The second stage "yum install yum" command ensures the local system has a consistant view of what is available locally.

4. Does this mean packages are downloaded twice?

Yes.

5. What is required to use these installations?

If you were working upon a real machine, and you used this software to download into a partition for example, or you wanted to bootstrap a Xen guest there are several steps you must complete to end up with a working system:

• Create/copy into place /etc/resolv.conf.
• Create/copy into place /etc/fstab.
• Optionally "yum install kernel".
• Optionally "yum install openssh-server".

These steps should result in a working "real", or "full", system.