remastering peculiarities
Hi,
I am remastering the KNOPPIX V5 CD to free up some space for some different
software.
I am following the quantian_howto_build guide (written for a 3.X series of
KNOPPIX) with some suitable modifications for the latest version of KNOPPIX.
Specifically, I have copied the contents of the cd to my hard drive and used
the cloop module to copy the compressed file system to a "source" directory.
I then chroot to the "source" directory and make modifications, namely,
remove some unneeded packages.
I then exit the chroot'ed "source" and make a compressed file system using the
following writing things to my "release" directory:
mkisofs -R -l -V "KNOPPIX iso9660 filesystem" -hide-rr-moved -v \
source/ | create_compressed_fs - 65536 > release/KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX
I then copy a bunch of files from the original cd to my "release",
specifically, I do the following:
cp -vax orig-cdrom/[abci]* release/
cp -vax orig-cdrom/KNOPPIX/[biklLmMR]* release/KNOPPIX/
cp -vax orig-cdrom/KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX-* release/KNOPPIX/
After creating md5sums, I then make the iso using the following:
mkisofs -pad -l -r -J -v -V "KNOPPIX" -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 \
-boot-info-table -b boot/isolinux/isolinux.bin -c boot/isolinux/boot.cat \
-hide-rr-moved -o ../knoppix.iso ../release
I then use qemu to boot this iso via:
qemu -m 512 -cdrom knoppix.iso -boot d
When I started this, I first tested that I could recreate the knoppix.iso
without doing any package deletion. That worked, so I then went to work
pruning packages. I did a big prune, and then made my iso going through the
above steps. When booting with qemu, I got the error:
"Couldn't find KNOPPIX filesystem . . "
I then started the whole process of pruning over again, thinking that I may
have deleted a crucial package. I then started to prune a few packages at a
time, creating an iso and testing with qemu. I could create bootable
modified knoppix.iso that worked.
However, I would occasionally, find that after deleting some packages and
recreating the iso, I would get the "Couldn't find KNOPPIX filesystem . . ."
error. When I got this error, I would try and do the above two mkisofs
commands and test with qemu to see if the KNOPPIX filesystem error was
non-deterministic.
I then tried to prune a few more packages from my "source" and recreate the
iso, and I was surprised to find that I created a bootable knoppix iso with
this new (slightly smaller package set) filesystem.
When I got the "Couldn't find KNOPPIX filesystem . . " error, I never tried to
actually burn my iso and reboot with my new computer. All testing
of "bootability" was through qemu.
Why would the KNOPPIX filesystem errors present themself with a certain set of
packages removed, the large ones, such as openoffice, firefox, scribus,
thunderbird, etc, and then go away when a few more larger packages were
removed from the chrooted "source"?
Am I getting some false errors by using qemu instead of actually burning them
to a cd and rebooting my computer? Using qemu was really a fast and
convenient way to test the iso. I would hate to have to actually burn the
iso when I go about remastering KNOPPIX.
Thanks for any insights,
John Schmidt
jaschmidt@uofu.net
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