Building DVD images
I recently built a woody DVD-R image and wanted to share my
experiences with the group. (The code I used will appear on my CD
hacks area at http://www.lordsutch.com/cds/debian-cd/ sometime
soon... nag me if you don't see it by Monday.)
The main issue I faced was that the shell's math seems to be limited
to 32 bit integers, which broke some of my disk sizing code (and may
also break bits of the standard scripts). I decided to change all the
code to use kilobytes instead of bytes, which resolved that problem.
I also had to hack my list2cds-cram code to use kilobytes (I could
have used Python longs instead, but with the 2kbyte rounding I decided
that there was no need to keep track of bytes any more).
I didn't hack the source disk building code, but it probably would
need it too. (You can't put source and binaries on the same DVD;
woody's binaries took up 3.9 gigabytes on Intel, just including main
and non-US/main. Double-sided media might work nice for this, if you
can get it...)
I was able to successfully write the ISO image at 2x to a Pioneer
DVD-R drive using the free DVD-R patch
(http://www.abcpages.com/~mache/cdrecord-dvd.html) for cdrecord. The
DVD-R was readable on both the drive that wrote it and the DVD-ROM on
my Toshiba laptop. (The laptop was also able to boot from the DVD-R.)
This was a one-off deal to test the DVD drive for my employers; I may
consider adding a DVD-R to my CD production farm if I can locate a
reasonably-priced 2x unit.
Anyway, I hope this info helps anyone who's considering building
Debian DVDs. I should have the code on the website in the next couple
of days.
Chris
--
Chris Lawrence <cnlawren@olemiss.edu> - http://www.lordsutch.com/chris/
Instructor and Ph.D. Candidate, Political Science, Univ. of Mississippi
208 Deupree Hall - 662-915-5765
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