I played around with catalyst2 this weekend.

Here's some notes on what I did and what I ended up with. Feel free to edit and add anything important or any glaring mistakes.

Installing

• Install catalyst2, it's in ~arch

• I created a working dir: ~/catalyst

• I copied the stage4 spec file for catalyst to my working dir

• I created a dir portage in catalyst to hold any packages.keyword, use, mask & unmask files for my stage4

• I created a dir overlays and linked the svn-checkout of the seeds svn to it.

• I downloaded a 2006.1 stage3 tarball and the latest portage-snapshot, and copied them to /var/tmp/catalyst/builds/default and /var/tmp/catalyst/snapshots respectively. You should be able to change those paths to something user-defined by editing /etc/catalyst2/catalyst2.conf

The catalyst stage4 spec file

The catalyst stage4 spec file is very straight forward and well commented.

I edited:

subarch: amd64
version_stamp: 2006.1.1
target: stage4
rel_type: default
profile: default-linux/amd64/2006.1/server
snapshot: 20060923
source_subpath: default/stage3-amd64-2006.1
pkgcache_path: /tmp/packages
kerncache_path: /tmp/kernel
stage4/packages: screen apache vim ethtool mytop apachetop
stage4/rcadd: apache2

This should add screen, apache, vim, ethtool, mytop & apahechetop to the stage4.

And add apache2 initscript to default ?? Not sure which run-level it will actually get added. It turns out that you have to specify both, I now have a new runlevel apache2 with apache2 added to that runlevel :-)

I picked the server-profile as a stage4 profile

Additionally the spec file allows you to specify a overlay dir and a /etc/portage dir. I haven't had the time yet to experiment with them but I expect them to work as advertised.