Making .uci & .dsl apps available at boot

Forum: DSL Embedded
Topic: Making .uci & .dsl apps available at boot
started by: desnotes

Posted by desnotes on Feb. 05 2006,17:08

I apologize if this is covered somewhere but I have searched the wiki and the forums and thought I had the answer but it doesn't work for me in the embedded mode.

I am running DSL from Qemu on both Windows and Linux host. I downloaded two additional apps, opera850.uci & samba.dsl that I would like to be available when I reboot. I created folders for them in hdb and in my qemu startup I have the following in the Qemu section:

-hdb qemu/harddisk

and in the DSL cheat codes section I added the following:

mydsl=hdb

After rebooting hdb is not mounted and the app icons are not available on the desktop. Am I missing something? If it is not currently possible to do this, is there a way I can automate the mount and making the apps available after boot up?

Thanks in advance,

desNotes

Posted by roberts on Feb. 05 2006,19:41

desnotes,
Very good but subtle points raised here.
I keep debating if I should go back to the -cdrom option of Qemu or not.

Two issues I think are playing here:
1. Folders, don't use them for each extension. The autoload extensions should be in the root of specified partition or in this case virtual drive. The folders concept is really for booting the machine with differenet personalities, e.g., a game machine or an office machine, then the mydsl option would not only specific the partition but also the folder. mydsl=hdb/games The folder(s) would contain the collection of extensions for that personality.

2. The second issue is much more complex. By booting Qemu without the -cdrom option but instead the -kernel option we end up without the cloop module loaded at boot time.
There was a small hack that allowed dynamic loading of uci type extensions by placing the insmod cloop into /opt/bootlocal.sh. However this does no good for boot time loading of uci extensions. A better hack to make both instances work is the following...

Boot up Qemu as normal.
As root do the following:
a.) Mount the virtual drive hdb
b.) mkdir /mnt/hdb/modules
c.) cp /lib/modules/2.4.x/kernel/drivers/block/cloop.o /mnt/hdb/modules
d.) edit /opt/bootlocal.sh and remove the insmod cloop line
e.) shutdown so backup occurs.

At the Windows level edit the dsl-windows.bat file and add another boot option within the append clause
modules=hdb

Now restarting the Qemu machine, these changes will insure that the cloop module is loaded so that boot time uci extensions will properly load.

Whew!
Nice find desnotes, thanks for reporting.

I suspect this complication could be avoided by using the -cdrom qemu boot option, but then we lose the easily changed and persistent boot options passed to dsl.

Posted by desnotes on Feb. 06 2006,00:10

robert,

Thank you for the response...it works great! Adding the modules folder and copying cloop.o over allowed the .uci apps to load at boot up.

I agree with you on setting up folders for different themes when booting...it could even be done with different virtual drives using Qemu.

From what I have seen, I believe sticking with the -kernel option is better in that it gives the user more boot options and my personal opinion is the -cdrom option is a little slower in time to boot.

thanks again,

desnotes