Re: Hurd advocacy? Bootable (Knoppix-like) CD?
On Wed, 20 Aug 2003, Greg Buchholz wrote:
> On Thu, 21 Aug 2003, Philip Charles wrote:
> > It is beyond my capabilities. A live CD would depend on having a native
> > installer for GNU with a hurdish ramdisk etc. Nice idea though.
>
> Hmmm... I'm probably out of my league here, but I'll ask anyway.
> Why would a native install or a ramdisk be necessary? I was just thinking
> of writing a GRUB boot image to the CD and have it boot the hurd system
> installed on the rest of the CD. Does the hurd write some
> initialization/configuration info to the filesystem? And I thought the
> main problem in having a native install was the lack of a hurdish fdisk.
> Maybe I'll get some time this weekend to take a look at it.
>
Knoppix, and other live CDs, work by creating a ramdisk which contains the
/ directory. Various other directories are then symlinked from the CD to
this ramdisk / directory. The kernel and other system dependent info is
also stored in the ramdisk, typically /etc.
For a GNU live CD to work a hurdish ramdisk would have to be created and
setup at the initial boot. If this could be done we could also use this
to create a native GNU installer. At the moment the CDs have to use a
Linux ramdisk and then reboot into GNU once the HDD has been setup. I can
think of no way of rebooting into a ramdisk.
Phil.
--
Philip Charles; 39a Paterson Street, Abbotsford, Dunedin, New Zealand
+64 3 488 2818 Fax +64 3 488 2875 Mobile 025 267 9420
philipc@copyleft.co.nz - preferred. philipc@debian.org
I sell GNU/Linux & GNU/Hurd CDs. See http://www.copyleft.co.nz
Reply to: