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Topic: Editable Configuration w/o rebuilding, Make DSL more twiddleable

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zmollusc

Group: Members
Posts: 3
Joined: May 2005

Posted: May 17 2005,12:31

Hello, i have a dos/windows background but have begun playing with linux live cds. I think DSL is great and i have installed it on an old PII to play with. The myDSL add-ons are superb!
Anyway, my only gripe is that it is so difficult to make changes to the distro. Yes, i can throw things into the root directory of the cd, but there is no way to get to the initial configuration scripts that are locked in the impregnable( to windows boxes) knoppix compressed 9660 file. I appreciate that it may just be my lack of skill that stops me building the thing from scratch, but devil linux has its configuration file external and looks for it on the cd/floppy/usb/hd that it can see when it wakes up. Thus one can easily set up the livecd to fire up samba and attach itself to one's workgroup for example.

I think i am hankering after an autoexec.bat file.

Apologies if i have missed anything glaringly obvious.......

clivesay

Group: Guests
Posts: 935
Joined: Dec. 2003

Posted: May 17 2005,12:49

Read about /home/dsl/filetool.lst. This is where you can save your settings to automatically backup and restore.

Read about /opt/bootlocal.sh. This is where you can add startup commands and scripts.

Read about mkmydsl. This will allow you to easily create a custom CD with all your personal settings.

I think most of this is described in the startup doc when you boot DSL.

Good luck!

Chris

mikshaw

Group: Members
Posts: 4856
Joined: July 2004

Posted: May 17 2005,13:12

If you boot with the "write" option, mkwriteable will run automatically, opening up the whole system for changes. As clivesay said, /opt/bootlocal.sh is a place to put any commands necessary to change configs that can't easily be done with backup/restore, and to run daemons such as samba. This should give you the ability to make any automatic changes you want to the system. You will need to understand some basic commands in order to properly use the bootlocal script, but it is no more difficult than making a bat file.

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http://www.tldp.org/LDP/intro-linux/html/index.html

zmollusc

Group: Members
Posts: 3
Joined: May 2005

Posted: May 17 2005,21:03

Thanks! I will read about the things you mention and have a faff about.
I wonder what I will break first? :laugh:

zmollusc

Group: Members
Posts: 3
Joined: May 2005

Posted: May 28 2005,19:56

Hello. I am having fun and learning things. I have put things in bootlocal so that monkey and samba start up (so I can put stuff in htdocs and see it appear magically in a browser). I failed to open the KNOPPIX file with cloop many times but now i have a copy of the contents.
Hilariously, my DSL box has 64MB ram so it can't mkisofs the KNOPPIX file, whereas my windoze box has 512MB ram but NTFS disks so it can't save the results. This is teaching me about mounting things over the network.

My only gripe about DSL is that nobody sells the 50MB business cards to put it on ( not really a prob as I use 8cm disks which fill out my empty wallet nicely ).
Anyhoo, my original 'want' is unneccessary when you start to get a grip on the situation, so feel free to delete this thread.

4 replies since May 17 2005,12:31

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