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Re: Just To Say Hi

Posted: 08 May 2012, 15:16
by Ahau
welcome, pumbaa2!

To answer your question on the mchat (it got lost a little bit!), Porteus comes with development packages by default, so you will be able to compile most packages from source (but you may need a handful of dependencies that would normally be included with a standard slackware install). If you need to compile drivers that require kernel sources, you should be able to accomplish this with the "crippled sources" module, which is available on our server and contains the kernel headers necessary for this to work.

Cheers!

Re: Just To Say Hi

Posted: 08 May 2012, 20:19
by pumbaa2
I take it the installer fails to install the MBR? I've ran the installer twice now and it still fails to boot from the hard disk. Filesystem type reiserfs and marked bootable in cfdisk. oh wait, does syslinux not know what reiserfs is?

hmmmm, trying lilo from inside lin_start_here.sh on sda1...

LOL, the lilo installer from lin_start_here assumes the images are at /dev/sda1/boot instead of /mnt/sda1/boot, I edited the lilo.conf to fix the issue reran lin_start_here to reinstall lilo and now it boots. You might want to fix that :P

Posted after 9 minutes 11 seconds:
Arg, the no pico editor is driving me crazy... At least it has mc... This is gonna take some getting use to. I've been using pico in Slackware for years.

Re: Just To Say Hi

Posted: 08 May 2012, 20:28
by pumbaa2
It won't mount a NFS share... well that could be a problem...

Posted after 31 second:
ohh okay...

Re: Just To Say Hi

Posted: 08 May 2012, 21:52
by Ahau
@pumbaa2,

no worries, it just helps keep things more organized to have comments/bug reports for development versions in one spot. I'll merge your post with the appropriate development thread -- which version/edition are you using?

Pico should be pretty easy to install, though I'm not familiar with what additional dependencies it will bring with it. Looks like it's part of the 'alpine' package, so from the command line it would look like this:

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slackyd -u    # update slackyd repository info
slackyd -g alpine    # download alpine package, it will prompt you for any dependencies
txz2xzm /var/log/alpine-2.00*.txz /mnt/sda1/porteus/modules/alpine.xzm    # repeat for any deps pulled by slackyd
activate /mnt/sda1/porteus/modules/alpine.xzm    # with the module here, it will always be activated on startup
You could also do this through Porteus Package Manager, but I'm guessing you prefer command line utilities over GUI :)

I'll take a look at lin_start_here and lilo.conf, though I've used it to install porteus to my flash drive a number of times without issue.

Re: Just To Say Hi

Posted: 09 May 2012, 10:29
by pumbaa2
I'm using Version 1.1 i486 (32 bit) from ISO installed onto a hard disk. I'm sure I'll find this once you move this conversation... Slackware linux doesn't have Forums and I'm still getting use to the layout of these Forums. There are a lot of topics... Very easy to get lost here. So once again my apologies for posting in the wrong topic and thanks for moving all this. :)

As far as the script goes, I'm sure it works well under normal conditions.. Everyone here is likely using ext3, ext4 or fat32 which is syslinux friendly. I just have my own habits and when I downloaded this distro, I treated it like I would slackware... Trip to cfdisk, create partition and mark active, save... mkreiserfs /dev/sda1, blar blar. When I rebooted it mounted it as /mnt/sda1 and I used the GUI tool to install the OS to the disk. I checked off Install Loader but it still didn't boot. BIOS error about no bootable media, etc, etc. Then I got to thinking syslinux likely doesn't like reiserfs, so I ran the script from /mnt/sda1 and told it to install LILO. I'm just use to lilo and I really didn't want to debug the problem with syslinux... Thats when the problem crept up and it wrote a lilo.conf with /dev/sda1/boot/vmlinuz as the filename instead of /mnt/..... That confused lilo and it failed to install. Once I saw the problem from the errors it gave, I simply edited lilo.conf and fixed the paths, then ran that script again and told it to install lilo. Problem solved. So I'm still on reiserfs, just with lilo and all its simplicity vs that very well drawn boot menu the ISO had with isolinux. Whoever put together the bitmaps, etc for the isolinux loader, great job! It makes me want to reformat it as ext3 just so I can install syslinux. :)

You guys got a FTP or HTTP Directory full of these modules... personally rather download them directly and just drop them in the modules directory and activate them. Overall, I have to catch up again, because I know all the ins and outs with slackware and I've already discovered the /etc/rc.d/ is remarkably simular to slackwares.. Right now I have a Slackware live that I built using build-slackware-live.sh. Same type of concept, I have a changes folder that shows new files added after the union was created and in that sense, I could copy out the files needed as I compiled and installed software 1 package at a time to make additional modules by simply snapshoting the changes folder, create module, then reboot (to clear changes (which is a ramdisk) and activate the new module I build from changes which in theory should bring me back to that current state) so I can make the next module (of course stripping /var/log, and other stupid things that are written by the OS).

My only real different with this OS is I don't want the memory disk mounted read-write at all. Rather it be like the ISO, create changes to a ramdisk and discard on reboot. It does this when booting Porteus from CD but not from the disk drive. Although, I'm sure you have some kernel parm that enables such support, for all I know "Always Fresh" does this for you, I just haven't played with that option yet.

On a good note, I could really be an asset to Porteus... I've always liked slackware and its simplicity, in a way this implements an "undo" option if things should really go wrong. This distro of linux is very neat, clean and compact. This is the IDEAL environment for making small appliance stuff like MythTV Frontends, Internet Cafe environments, Arcade Machines, etc. Not to say that its limited to that. Because in no way is that true. EVERY slackware package could be converted to LZMA Modules. In a few days I could rebuild this entire system to run a full fledged Slackware System and the entire system could have those packages (modules), activated, deactivated, deleted, on the fly. And it would do every bit as good as running slackware itself. The only real reason that would be silly is because this distro is much more up to date... They are still pondering the 2.6 kernel on Slackware 13.37 and I finally got bored waiting for the next release... This is running a kernel that's just about BLEEDING edge these days. Although, I did manually build a 3.x kernel in Slackware 13.37 and it worked GREAT!

I've had some interest in btrfs since I watched the conference video about it and a bleeding edge kernel is needed to use the latest features, fixes. Same sorta concept you can pull off using Porteus. Except instead of modules you have filesystem snapshots built into the filesystem itself with compression, etc. Restoring to a previous point was as easy as a kernel parm from the boot loader that points at the specific filesystem snapshot id number. It also supports filesystem level raid (each file can be mirrored or not depending on flags, etc).

Anyhow, it looks like you guys run a really cool community here and I wouldn't mind being apart of it...

Porteus v1.1 installing to HD

Posted: 09 May 2012, 13:46
by brokenman
Topic moved here from 'just to say hello' thread. I chose the newbie thread because the information may be useful to people wanting to install to HD. The original poster "pumbaa2" certainly does not appear to be a newbie.

pumbaa2 welcome to the community, any help you may provide would be received gratefully. The latest candidate release can be found in the 'testing' folder on the server which runs latest usable kernel (3.3.4 in this case). There were many bug fixes and new additions in this release which i recommend you try.

My only real different with this OS is I don't want the memory disk mounted read-write at all
You can boot to ram and then remove your USB device after booting. That should stop anything writing to it! Have a look in the boot/docs/cheatcode.txt for a list of boot time cheatcodes. You can add any of these cheats to your porteus.cfg file on the prefered boot line to have them permanent.

Once again welcome and i hope you find the community (and OS) to your liking.

Re: Porteus v1.1 installing to HD

Posted: 09 May 2012, 15:23
by Ahau
Thanks for splitting and moving threads, brokenman :)

@pumbaa2, regarding the memory disk -- using the default boot entry, yes, your changes will be saved persistently (on a POSIX compatible drive) out of the box, at /mnt/sdXY/porteus/changes/. If you boot with 'always fresh' mode (or simply remove the 'changes=...' cheatcode from the default boot entry) then your writeable branch for aufs ('changes') is mounted on RAM instead of your drive, and any change you make to the system will dissapear on reboot. However, your hard drive will still be mounted and write-accessible, at /mnt/sdXY/. If you want to have the drive mounted read only, I think you might be able to do this (but haven't tested it yet) with the 'mopt' (mount options) cheatcode... something like 'mopt=ro,noatime,nodiratime,suid,dev,exec'. You could try 'copy2ram' with 'nohd' as well, but it might prevent reading your modules from the hard drive (forgive me on this one -- I never boot Porteus from my hard drive). You could also do something like 'copy2ram autoexec=umount~/dev/sda1` to copy all of the modules into RAM (this happens early in the boot process) and then unmount your hard drive (this would happen right before logging in/xorg startup).

I don't think there's anything to debug with sylinux and reiserfs, I think reiserfs is just plain unsupported, so you're pretty much stuck with lilo (or you could install grub) unless you change to another fs for your boot partition. Speaking of btrfs, I like it too, and will probably be switching over to it (currently using ext4) at some point. And, I believe syslinux supports it. NILFS2 is also a lot of fun if you like playing around with checkpoints and snapshots :)

If you prefer to download individual porteus modules, you can grab them direct from the server via http: http://ponce.cc/porteus/i486/modules/

you can also download any slackware package and convert it to a porteus module with the 'txz2xzm' command.

Also, take a look at the 'changes-time.sh' script (/opt/porteus-scripts/changes-time.sh), it takes a snapshot of all files that have been modified in your 'changes' branch within the previous $x minutes -- comes in very handy for some of the stuff you're talking about doing.

Ok, that's a lot of info for now, I'll give it a rest :) Glad to have you aboard!

EDIT:

I went through liloinst.sh and given the error you described (/dev/sda1 instead of /mnt/sda1), I think the problem might lie in the creation of the $MYMNT and/or $TARGET variables, here:

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# Find out which partition or disk are we using
MYMNT=$(cd -P $(dirname $0) ; pwd)
while [ "$MYMNT" != "" -a "$MYMNT" != "." -a "$MYMNT" != "/" ]; do
   TARGET=$(egrep "[^[:space:]]+[[:space:]]+$MYMNT[[:space:]]+" /proc/mounts | cut -d " " -f 1)
   if [ "$TARGET" != "" ]; then break; fi
   MYMNT=$(dirname "$MYMNT")
done
Did you run the 'lin_start_here.sh' script from Porteus (running from CD or USB), or from slackware? If possible, could you please boot back into this environment and give us the output of 'cat /proc/mounts'?

Thanks!

Another edit:

As fanthom pointed out on the mchat, this was probably caused by a bug in pinstaller, which generated a bad lilo.conf. liloinst.sh uses an existing lilo.conf if it finds one, so the buggy info got passed along. I believe this has already been addressed in pinstaller, so everything should work better in 1.2RC2 :)

Re: Porteus v1.1 installing to HD

Posted: 10 May 2012, 04:44
by pumbaa2
I replicated the result using my Servers VirtualBox VM Environment (256Meg Memory Allocation, 8Gig HD Image (reiserfs)). I ran the script while booted into the Live CD from /mnt/sda1/boot after running the GUI Installer. However, I found that the problem isn't in the lin_start_here.sh script itself. It seems that when you select to install the bootloader (syslinux I assume) from the GUI installer it creates a lilo.conf as well. When I run ./lin_start_here.sh and selected option 8 it mentions that a lilo.conf already exists and its going to use it. It runs md5sums, etc and finally tries to install the lilo.conf and that is where it fails. This situation only came up because I figured the GUI installer would succeed with the bootloader install. So when I booted the CD the second time that's when I found that script, by then lilo.conf already existed from the GUI Installer Program.

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Flushing filesystem buffers, this may take a while...
Existing /mnt/sda1/boot/lilo.conf has been found - using it for installation...
Updating MBR to setup boot record...
Fatal: open /dev/sda1/boot/vmlinuz: Not a directory
Since the GUI install is geared for syslinux, I would just remove the lilo.conf creating code. Otherwise make the installer detect that its not FAT or EXT[234] and use lilo as the default loader in that situation (best idea really). If you fail to check off install boot loader from the GUI installer and then run the lin_start_here.sh script, it does install lilo correctly. Anyhow, I hope this helps...

Re: Porteus v1.1 installing to HD

Posted: 11 May 2012, 02:14
by brokenman
Fair dinkum, i thought i squashed this bug a while back. Just to confirm ... you are using v1.1 right?

Please download the latest pinstaller from below and see if the issue is resolved.

http://www.mediafire.com/?3vw9s99sh2rvjep