some days of skip and progress report
hi,
cdlinux.sourceforge.net Chinese Debian GNU/Linux running on Live CD
i may have some days of skip to wait for kernel-image-2.4.3 to come
into debian officially. i don't want build it myself, my box is slow
and i hope to make cdlinux as much as possible to be looked as debian
official. (2.4.2 is not suited for our use, its mount -o loop is
broken which is critical for us. 2.2 is lacking cramfs, which is
critical for us too.)
for now, the partial, un-official progress report is below:
i have a chroot running xserver-fbdev running, and devfs, that means
we need only keep /var and portions of /home and /etc and /root in
ram2.gz aka ramdisk. and this chroot is a full debian comformaing
env. i haven't got every single users up there as i promised days
before, but this should be trivial. ;)
to turn this chroot into iso images, i have the directories arranged
well for be used with a mixture of cramfs and isofs (cramfs is ugly
frankly), and a fake write transparancy is achieved though massive
symlinks. ;) (this is kinda weird, but with some relatively minor
hack, this may actually be the one to do the thing. ;)
with the cd image file, i will buy the cd burner some days later, as
soon as i got the iso image ready and tested. technically, we have
linuxrc ready which is able to set the root devices and setup the
filesystem tree from images files from cdrom. all is fine. except one
thing.
we have to modprobe cdrom kernel modules, especially in the case of
scsi cdroms and pcmcia stuffs. while our current linuxrc wrt modprobe
is just a mass. everytime i feel i have to write and clean up the code
for modprobe etc, i feel big headache, if anyone could do this for
me.. ;)
<rant>
i thought to integrated our relativesy small code (effective part)
into debian's busybox, but thought it would be hard to let them
integrated these code in 'cause cdrom detection and /etc/fstab rewrite
would definitely not something they need.
</rant>
that is the progress report.
below is some random thought to do installation from cdrom to
harddisk. with this we may actually bully debian-cd. ;)
our advatgtg is the great potential for ui in the installation
stage. see, a real (albeit slow) linux system is running there.
we have to know the pros and cons of dpkg-repack, and the repack is
really a disaster 'cause we would have no place to put the result .deb
so we have to actually get over the overhead, that means we, what, a
deb filesystem, geez..
i mean, we have to cheat dpkg/apt-get that we're having a .deb here,
just extracted into a filesystem instead of tarred into the .deb
file. all i could say in this stage is is this is certainly
doable. but i don't know where to start. dpkg? apt-get? or something
else?
partition and harddisk detection and mkfs is all there, maybe you
could write gtk frontend for each of them and add some automagice to
them.
um, then is a weird problem again, we're install from system A (cdrom,
which is funtional) into system B (harddisk, which is non-functional)
how to?
apt-get and dpkg certainly can't do this. they could only install
package to system A within system A. this is not what we
want. debian's debian-installer and boot-flooppies don't have this
problem 'cause they are running on system A when installing into
system A. (hence they have an ugly user interface, 'cause system A is
very limited in the beginning.)
<rant>
indeed to install to sys A from sys B would be useful in general,
think abot debian developers to setup chroot environment. (if they
have no base.tgz)
</rant>
after all this, we will bully debian-cd and debian will beat 'em all
for with the most flashy installation hehe. (if you have a slow
system, you could install for a day long if you while insallation play
with flightgear. ;)
p.s. oh yeah, chinese support is fucked up right now. so we actually
get cdlinux, instead of (cd^2)linux. ;)
pps. please stop using helix, aka ximian gnome for testing. i want a
full real debian.
--
http://dim.sourceforge.net ............... Debian Chinese Input Method
http://njlug.sourceforge.net ............ NanJing GNU/Linux User Group
http://cdlinux.sourceforge.net ........... Debian running on Live! CDs
http://people.debian.org/~zw ...................... XEmacs Screenshots
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