Compiling the Unattended Project linuxboot on CentOS5

I use the Unattended Project to deploy various Windows 2003 server versions via PXE. The following describes how to get Unattended Linuxboot (tftp or pxe boot method) to properly compile on a CentOS5 based Linux system. The CentOS machine was deployed with minimum software packages, so your mileage may vary depending on what you already have installed or not.

yum install gcc gcc-c++ wireless-tools-devel bison bison-devel ncurses-devel flex subversion
cd /usr/src
svn co https://unattended.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/unattended/trunk unattended
cd unattended/linuxboot
nano -w Makefile

1. Set the Mysql version to the latest 5.X version at mysql.com otherwise it will not download.
2. Set the glibc version to 2.5 (the same version CentOS 5 uses)

make download
make tftpboot -j 4

Notes: The ‘-j 4’ option means that I have 4 CPU cores (Q9550 CPU) and to use all 4 of them. If you have more or less CPU cores, change this setting accordingly. On a Q9550 compilation takes around 10 minutes. On lesser CPU’s like a P4, it could take an hour or more. If compilation stops in an error state, either a package failed to download or your system is missing some dependencies.

You can compile a CD ISO with the ‘make iso -j 4’ command instead.

3 Responses to Compiling the Unattended Project linuxboot on CentOS5

  1. Randy says:

    Additional notes for pushing a new compilation into production:

    Copy over install/scripts, install/tmp, and install/site from previous installation. There are custom scripts in these folders that facilitate the post install process.

  2. Randy says:

    Also, install/packages/perl and install/os

  3. Linux says:

    Hi,
    i was trying to compile latest unattended but it failed with the following error.
    make: *** No rule to make target `zlib-1.2.3/zlib.h’, needed by `fakeinclude/zlib.h’. Stop.

    i changed it to 1.2.5 and 1.2.3 but no luck ?

    what is missing there ? iam running centos 5.4,

    Thanks