Customizing pendrive boot system

Forum: USB booting
Topic: Customizing pendrive boot system
started by: JohnH

Posted by JohnH on Mar. 10 2006,17:11

Booting with "dsl toram" DSL 2.3 RC1 from a pendrive (using USB bootfloppy)
Hardware:
Gateway E-3200 440BX chipset, Pheonix BIOS 4 ver 6
PII-450, 512Mb ram
128Mb Apacer handy Steno 1.1 Pendrive

The system boots with a failure to change to cdrom2 warning

I always have to reload Audacity though for every reboot. Sometimes I will not have internet and want to customize my pendrive so audacity is already loaded at boot.

Here is what i try to do:

1. left click MyDsl > multimedia > audacity1.2.2 > download
2. audacity icon appears onto desktop
3. right click Emelfm > Emelfm super user
4. navigate in left pane to /ramdisk/tmp
5. navigate in right pane to /mnt/sda1
6. click Mkdir button
7. type /opt in dialog windo click ok
8./mnt/ sda1//opt directory appears in right pane
(no other files show in /mnt/sda1 though)
9. doublw click on new /opt directory to open it
10. Highlight audacity.tz file in left pane (/ramdisk/tmp directory)
11. click copy
12. right pane shows audacity copied into /mnt/sda1/opt directory
13. close Emelfm and reboot
14 after boot up the new directory and copied audacity file does not appear.

Posted by doobit on Mar. 10 2006,17:28

The /opt directory in the pendrive is compiled in the knoppix image, and therefore is not permanent. The persistant /home and /opt are for a Frugal install to a CF disk or hard drive with a bootloader, like grub or lilo.
You have different options with the pendrive install. One is to create a new directory called /optional (not opt) under the top directory in the pendrive. This is a good place to put all of your regular dsl extentions that you want to save and open seperately using the mydsl button.
The other option is to copy to the /cdrom folder. This folder is writable and is the place that DSL will look for myDSL extentions if you specify mydsl=

? in the boot options to load any extentions that are in there automatically at boot. Make sure you have enough RAM to hold them if you decide to do that.
Also, you may add the full path to an application in your .filetool.lst and /opt/bootlocal.sh scripts to have them start at bootup. Audacity needs to run as root to work properly anyway, so put it in the /opt/bootlocal.sh script.

Posted by JohnH on Mar. 10 2006,20:05

Quote (doobit @ Mar. 10 2006,12:28)

...
You have different options with the pendrive install. One is to create a new directory called /optional (not opt) under the top directory in the pendrive. This is a good place to put all of your regular dsl extentions that you want to save and open seperately using the mydsl button. ....

OK I'll try that. How will I get the /optional directory onto the pendrive?
How do I make the system look there when I click MyDSL instead of looking on the internet site?

Posted by roberts on Mar. 10 2006,20:20

The toram option confuses things.
In a normal boot from pendrive, you can copy extensions to the writeable /cdrom as it, the pendrive (sda1), is mounted as /cdrom and is writebale as root. Extensions copied this way will auto load at boot time.
You can, as root, also make an optional directory,e.g., /cdrom/optional and a menu will be made for these optionally available extensions, i.e., not autoloaded but on the mydsl menu.

Using toram option, the pendrive is no longer mounted as /cdrom. You would have to manually mount /mnt/sda1 to be able to write to the pendrive. Which is now /mnt/sda1 and NOT /cdrom. It does not make much sense to make an optional directory on the pendrive for auto menu creation if the pendrive is booted toram as the pendrive becomes unmounted. You can still have the autoloaded extensions via a copy to /mnt/sda1

This interplay caused by using toram works the same as a mydsl.iso with /optional and booted to toram.

Posted by doobit on Mar. 10 2006,21:23

These options are set up when you install. I still need to try one with the new script for toram. I was going to do that last night but I didn't get a chance. I'll try again tonight.

Posted by JohnH on Mar. 11 2006,00:04

Quote (roberts @ Mar. 10 2006,15:20)

In a normal boot from pendrive, you can copy extensions to the writeable /cdrom as it, the pendrive (sda1), is mounted as /cdrom and is writebale as root. Extensions copied this way will auto load at boot time.

Success! Thanks!

After giving the reboot command:

There is a message box saying "unsaved extensions on ram drive, save them?"

Clicking yes opens Emelfm cliking no allows the system to reboot.

What is supposed to happen after clicking yes and Emelfm opens?

Posted by roberts on Mar. 11 2006,00:35

Normally extensions are downloaded to /tmp, which is on the ramdisk.

This is one area where users think that they have to download them everytime they boot up. Instead of answering the question of how to save extensions a bazillion times, the system now does a friendly prompt to say, "hey you have unsaved extensions", and since I could not possibly know where you might want to save them, and since most writeable devices require root access, I open a super-user emelfm so that you can drag-n-drop the extensions to a persistent store.

If you have already manually copied the extensions they you can ignore it.