Subject: From: Date:

Re: [ecs] ECS/Linux CDROM distribution Ingo Pakleppa 09 Oct 2003 00:27:20 -0700

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On Tue, 2003-10-07 at 11:25, Mark Gilmore wrote:
> Hi all,
> RE my attempt at creating a bootable RH9 CD preloaded with ECS:
> Though some of you have kindly provided sage advice on this matter
> (which I have thoroughly studied), I'm afraid that I am still quite lost :-).
> Perhaps someone knows of a site listing a step-by-step procedure,
> including the process on how one *selects* the files to be burned ?
> I have yet to find anything on this topic.
> 
> In offering any suggestions, *please* recall that I know very little of 
> Linux itself.
> I know that I should really take a Linux course before attempting this,
> but time and $ do not permit.

A very good resource is http://www.linuxfromscratch.org. The focus of
this project is somewhat different - if you follow the instructions to
the letter, you'll end up building your own Linux distribution onto a
separate partition of the hard disk. But there are quite a few tech
notes on that site (a bit hidden), and several explain how to boot off
CD-ROM.

I do *not* recommend that you actually build linux from scratch this
way. It took me about six months to get it to run properly off CD-ROM
(first successful boot to a bash prompt was around two months).

There are other Linux projects out there that focus on special
hard-wired situations. For instance, the Linux Router Project might be a
starting point.

> Does anyone know if it is possible to create a special folder holding
> all files/folders to be burned, and emulate a boot without burning a CD ?

Yes, for the most part. The key command is chroot. It will basically
hide everything below this "special folder" and make it look as if it
was the root of the file system. And this means, it hides everything
completely. For instance, you would have to have bash installed into
/home/myhome/root_of_tree/bin for it to show up as expected. The files
in etc are similarly hidden, and you will see instead the ones in
/home/myhome/root_of_tree/etc.

And so on.

There are a few caveats:

- chroot does not change the whole system, only processes launched from
within chroot.

- you cannot boot the new kernel, and the bootup sequence is also
difficult to test this way.

- all the daemons you are running will still be running. For instance,
if you have apache running, port 80 will still be in use even in chroot.

But chroot is as complete as it gets.

> I have seen .RPM kernel distributions at 
> http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/info/redhat.html#latest.
> I was wondering if I should refer to the RPM for my kernel to see what
> files I should burn (at a minimum).

The kernel by itself won't help you much. It would be kind of like in
the old days of MS-DOS 3.x putting IO.SYS onto a floppy but not putting
MSDOS.SYS or COMMAND.COM on it.

At the very absolute minimum, you will need:

- kernel
- glibc
- initscripts 
- bash
- coreutils
- sed
- grep
- diffutils
- zlib

You may also need to prepare your own initrd.

You may also need quite a few other packages. Among the more likely
ones:

- perl
- ncurses

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