Trying to build an appliance box

Forum: User Feedback
Topic: Trying to build an appliance box
started by: als

Posted by als on Mar. 10 2005,16:04

Hi folks,

I'm trying to build an appliance type box to use with < motion > software.

I want something that can boot from a read-only partition on a hard drive (or CF or something) and store all temporary files on a ramdisk - so that it could be shut off and turned back on without damaging a rw mounted filesystem. So this week I started learning knoppix - figuring that if it ran from a CD, it would happily run from a ro filesystem.

I eventually learned about the minirt initrd that sets up all the symlinks to the ro filesystem, then creates the ramdisk and runs the OS with all the temporary files pointed to a rw filesystem in RAM. That's exactly what I want!

Then I found DSL, which is great too because I don't need a personal workstation - just an appliance server. So I pulled the files out of the DSL KNOPPIX iso filesystem and put them on a hard drive partition, thinking I would modify it for my app. I'm booting the CD image's kernel and minirt.gz. I had to modify linuxrc to mount DSL from the HD instead of the loop device.

Now when I boot DSL from the HD, it leaves the fluxbox menu empty except for "xterm, restart, exit". Where does it build this menu from? Cause when I run it from the CD, it somehow knows what it's apps are.

Posted by Modrak on Mar. 14 2005,23:28

You must not login as "root" but as "dsl" instead...