Re: Common Live CD base and generator

[Fleny68 <fleny68@free.fr>]

p.carsten@arcor.de a écrit :
> Hello everyone,
hello,

> thanks for all your attention. Unfortunately this goes accross different
> lists, so please just ignore if you are not interested.
same for me.

> > From what you wrote Alex, the morphix tools look very promising as part of a
> universal debian-live CD generator as they take regular .debs.
Well. Morphix is modular knoppix cloop based, isn't it?

This modularity is a good way, but a personnal livecd neds more: the 
choice of every .deb installed in the LiveCD.

I am not sure this is more easy to make a personnal module for morphix, 
than to personalize knoppix.

> OK, now I now what you ment before when talking about the problem with
> compressed images. You would also need compressed chunks of data to allocate
> in the .template. Unfortunately they are not the same as the .debs and
> they are hard to locate in the loop file in the first place.

There is only 2 solutions:
 - You may have a mirror with the file to get, even if the files are 
conprssed trunks of data. But you lose the possibility to reuse the 300 
debian mirrors.
In this case you split the compressed loop fs, and put in the mirrors 
the compressed data. A better way than cloop to use with that is a 
compressed filesystem, like squashfs[1], because you compress file by 
file and all the unchanged files can be kept. You just have to split the 
squashed loop image by inode and by files.

 -  You write an adaptation of jigdo: it could get a .deb, unpack it 
and put the files in the right place of the iso, eventually compressing 
them. For that jigdolivecd-file needs to know what deb contains what 
file in the fs.
Of course the second solution needs a compressed filesystem instead a 
compressed block system, i.e. squashfs [1] instead of cloop.
 With cloop you need to get all the files and to compress after. In 
squashfs you need the compressed inode too, this is a kind of .template 
to add in this case.


[1] squashfs is good enough[2] to replace cloop, i use it in the 
k-mib-ppc project (it's a port of knoppix for ppc).
http://squashfs.sourceforge.net

[2] http://mail.nongnu.org/archive/html/k-mib-ppc/2004-02/msg00009.html


Regards,

--
Fleny