After more testing I have narrowed the issue that I left off with to a problem with the yum conf inside of the chroot.

I just got the patch working to the centos-5 postinstall script that does fix this issue. So to clarify I did add to /etc/rinse/centos-5.packages

Those package were

e2fsprogs-libs

authconfig

That was early in the debugging and after I found the real issue I removed those packages without causing issues.

So what do you need to do to bootstrap centos5 with rinse? All you need to do is apply a small patch to the post install script. Here is the patch rinse-centos5.patch.

Here is how you apply it.

As root:

cd /usr/lib/rinse/centos-5

wget http://www.cmdln.org/images/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/rinse-centos5.patch

patch -p0 < rinse-centos5.patch [/bash]