how to persist changes to / ?

Forum: myDSL Extensions (deprecated)
Topic: how to persist changes to / ?
started by: rhlee

Posted by rhlee on Dec. 20 2004,10:11

Hi,

This is probably a pretty basic question, but I'm having trouble getting changes that I've made to / to persist across runs. I'm running DSL under QEMU (and I've tried a variety of the boot options) and I want to install some new packages. However, across runs (of the emulator), none of the changes made to / by installing the new packages have been persisted. I see:

% mount
/dev/root on / type ext2 (rw)
...
/dev/hda on /mnt/hda type ext2 (rw,nosuid,nodev)

changes to /mnt/hda do seem to persist. However, some of the packages that I want to install (which do not have a .dsl distribution) and changes to /etc/* conf files dont.

Any help would be much appreciated,
thanks,
-Rob

Posted by ico2 on Dec. 20 2004,15:34

hda under qemu is a virtual file system, it is stored in the file "harddisk" in the qemu directory, changes will still be there after a reboot. you can use filetool.lst to add file you need to backup and backup to hda.

welcome to the forums

Posted by rhlee on Dec. 20 2004,19:04

Thanks for the quick reply.

So are you saying that I need to figure out every file that's changed by my package install and add that to the filetool.lst? I tried adding /etc, /lib, etc... to that file, but then shutdown hangs while "backing up hda" and subsequent startup also hangs.

What I'm trying to do is setup an "world" which is the base image, plus a certain set of packages that I want to apt-get that I can run off of a USB key under qemu. But whatever changes I make, don't last. For example, If I do dkpg-restore and then shutdown and restart, the change does not persist.

thanks for the help,
-Rob

Posted by Fordi on Dec. 21 2004,13:37

It sounds like you've got QEMU booting from the CD.

After running the HD-Install script, you need to add (change) the -boot paramater (from -boot d) to -boot c.

Oh, also, mksparse will NOT work on a USB stick running FAT32 (the one available to almost all systems as read/write). In other words, you MUST make your HD image on the USB stick very exacting, or you either lose space for QEMU to run or you can't fit the whole thing on the USB stick.

I really suggest you remaster in a "real" environment on a spare hard drive, boot that CD in QEMU and "frugal" install to a QEMU Hard drive.