On Sat, Jun 21, 2003 at 06:30:25PM +0100, john gennard wrote: > I have become interested in the creation of a personalised distro. > 'Gentoo' was on the CD which accompanied my monthly Linux Magazine, > but this only contained tarballs for 3 stages. After asking around, > I was referred to 'Linuxfromscratch' - its literature is very > detailed and after reading it two or three times I'm beginning > 'to see the light' (tongue in cheek!!). > > Sometimes I have access to an ADSL line, so I have downloaded an > .iso image of Gentoo. Now, I realised that I didn't understand > exactly what an .iso image was, so I've googled and now have that > a little clearer. But what I don't understand is how to boot the > image I've downloaded and I find no clear explanation. > > I've found a Windows program called 'undisker' which allows me to > see what is in the image. Briefly it contains two folders, one > named 'gentoo' which holds bz2 files for the three stages, and > the other named 'isolinux' which contains files which have to do > with booting (some of the .msg files are readable as text), plus > a file named 'livecd.cloop' (35+Mb) - google tells me this is > 'compressed loopback filesystem support'. > > I burned the .iso image to a CD, but to make it bootable, I was > asked to add the contents of a floppy - presumably containing > drivers to activate a CD-ROM drive. I couldn't do anything about > that, and if I change my BIOS to boot from a CD-ROM it doesn't. > I thought the .iso downloaded was bootable. > > Would someone kindly explain (in simple terms):- > > 1. How to I get the CD to boot? When it asks for the contents of a floppy, it's not looking for CD-ROM drivers but for the bootloader code, kernel and stuff off a *bootable* floppy. I've mucked about with the make-bootable-CD facility of Nero in Windoze, and found that it will make bootable CDs using boot floppies made from the images on Debian installation CDs. But you shouldn't need to do this. It sounds as if whatever program/method you're using to burn the CD is trying to be too clever, with this do-this-and-that to make it bootable; I think what you've ended up with is a CD containing the .iso image as one big file, rather than a CD which replicates the .iso image. Burning .iso images is dead easy: cdrecord -v dev=x,y,z filename.iso where x,y,z are the numbers that cdrecord -scanbus gives for your CD burner, in the first column. > 2. Is there some special reason to use the cloop - would > some other form of compression not surfice? Yes, there is a reason. It's got useful files in it... It's not "compressed loopback filesystem support", but a "compressed loopback filesystem". A kernel which includes compressed loopback filesystem support can mount this file as a filesystem, and it can then be accessed just like a CD. > 3. Is there a linux package which allows one to read > and extract files from an .iso image. Loopback mounting again, but this time not the compressed variety. It's not a package, it's a kernel option which AFAIK is enabled by default in stock kernels. You only need a special package on Windoze, because Windoze is crap :-) (as root) mount /path/to/filename.iso /mnt -o loop -t iso9660 -- Pigeon Be kind to pigeons Get my GPG key here: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x21C61F7F
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