If you're looking for instructions to install a Linux Athena machine,
have a look at /mit/bootkit/rhlinux/INSTRUCTIONS.  The documentation
below is mostly for maintainers.

==============================================================================

The installer for Linux Athena consists of the following four pieces:

1) boot floppies & miniroot (and optional driver disks)
2) Installer volume
3) Red Hat and Athena packages

***

1) BOOT FLOPPIES AND MINIROOT

The boot floppies and miniroot are generated from a modified copy of the
Redhat installer.  The sources for this are stored in
/mit/install/rhlinux/repository under the redhat subdirectory.  They
generate both a boot disk image and a miniroot which is fetched from the
boot server (currently tkl), as well as a bunch of optional driver disk
images (of which drvnet.img is the most interesting) as well as a CD ISO
image.

To build boot floppies and a miniroot, do the following:

 export CVSROOT=/mit/install/rhlinux/repository
 cvs co redhat
 cd redhat
 [check Makefile for any optional packages required]
 make

You'll find the miniroot in redhat/installer/rhlinux<version>.img and the
floppy image and driver disks in redhat/images.  The build process now
creates a CD image as well, as redhat/images/athena.iso.  To actually
burn a CD image, see the instructions in the cdrecord locker.

2) INSTALLER VOLUME (/mit/install/rhlinux/installer)

The installer volume source is made from the makeinstaller script in
the installer directory.  It functions much like the miniroot does,
only with a significantly greater number of packages.  In addition, it
contains a phase2 script which drives the actual installation of the
system.

The installer volume needs to be built and then installed in
/afs/{athena,dev}/system/rhlinux/installer, where the miniroot loader
will expect to find it.

See the phase2 source to see the details of how the actual
installation of the machine proceeds.

4) RED HAT AND ATHENA PACKAGES (/mit/source; Red Hat distribution CDs
   and website upgrades)

These all live in /afs/{athena,dev}/system/rhlinux and the list of
packages to install is governed by the control files in
.../system/rhlinux/control.

***

Updating notes:

1) The miniroot can be updated each time a new package comes out which is
   on it, but by no means has to.  The most important reason to update it
   is when we want to support install hardware that the older kernel
   doesn't manage, and this can usually be taken care of simply by
   updating the software in the installer volume.  In addition, version
   skew between the miniroot libraries and such and the installer volume
   utilities can cause problems.