development distro assistance?
Forum: DSL Embedded
Topic: development distro assistance?
started by: marc_island
Posted by marc_island on July 18 2005,01:59
Ok, I've been searching through the forums, and every solution i've tried hasn't worked. Maybe it's because i'm using dsl 1.3, maybe it's because i'm a moron . . . who knows?hopefully this isn't in the wrong area
well my goal is to create a usb development suite. So the gcc, g++ jazz, and the qt libraries would be nice.
Unfortunately, no matter where i place the dsl files, they aren't automatically loaded on startup. /root and /opt were recommended and proved fruitless.
And the descriptions i've found for remastering the distrobution involve using linux outside of dsl . . .
unfortunately i'm running windows, so it's a whole different can of worms.
I was hoping maybe someone would be able to guide me towards my goal? Obviously a full remaster would be a cleaner solution, but i don't mind dirty ones so long as I can compile right after booting.
thank you in advance
Posted by mgmont on July 18 2005,03:17
I don't know how you have DSL installed, but you need to be sure that you designated a partition for backup/restore. Some of the apps that you want probably involve more that just the base application. For instance you may have the base application that you moved to root or some place you have designated for persistancy, but the install also added libraries needed for the application in places like /usr/lib. If you do not also save and restore these files, your application will not work when you reboot.I had a similar problem when I wanted to add "aumix" which I downloaded from Debian. It included multiple library files. What I ended up doing was to add the line "usr/lib" (without quotes) to filetool.lst. This has the effect of backing up all the files and subdirectorys within usr/lib. I know this backs up a lot more than I need, but it was a quick and dirty method and it works.
I hope this helps.
Posted by ke4nt1 on July 18 2005,04:41
marc,I'm guessing that your confused about /root and /opt ..
For storing extensions, and having them self-install at boottime,
you need to use the "root" of whatever partition you use to store things.
e.g /mnt/hda2 <-- this is the root of your /dev/hda2 partition
NOT the /root directory in linux , this is for user root files only.
Same with placing them in /optional for menu accessability.
They would go into /mnt/hda2/optional , NOT /opt ,
which is for operational files, not extension storage.
If you used e.g /dev/hda2 for extension storage,
you could use this line at boottime.
dsl mydsl=hda2
Then DSL would know to look in /mnt/hda2 for any extensions to load,
and look in /mnt/hda2/optional for any extensions to add to menu.
73
ke4nt
Posted by marc_island on July 18 2005,10:56
wow - thank you guys so much for such a quick and friendly response!ok, i guess a little more background info is required for my goals:
As much as I love the idea of booting directly from the usb key and getting that sweet speed, It jsut doesn't seem that practical when so many computers have interesting quirks about booting options. And a lot of public computers don't allow you to reboot anyways (some library terminals come to mind), so qemu is the way I went.
So the way I installed dsl is getting the dsl-embedded 1.3 zip that includes qemu, the dsl image, and the harddisk image, and unzip it to a 128 MB key (if i require more space, i can move it to a 512)
to mgmont:
I may be mistaken, but i thought that the dsl packages were similar to rpm and deb packages, they just install very nicely on dsl. So if i stored the dsl package in a saved folder and loaded them on boot-time, then they would install to all of the temporary subdirectories and such. If i installed them, then added *every* directory where files were added/changed, then i wouldn't need to keep the .dsl file at all?
Of course, both have disadvantages. . . saving the dsl file will take extra space and extra time at boot to install. Where as saving all of the directories in the .filetool.lst takes extra time at bootup to restore the backup for each directory, and backs it up everytime you shut it down.
and for ke4nt1:
ok, i take it I'm screwing myself over with using qemu in terms of your directions. I thought it mounted the harddisk image as /mnt/hda . . . so I cannot access /dev/hd2 (unless you meant for me to download the .dsl file directly to the usb key outside of dsl, in which case i'd need to move to a larger usb key)
Mydsl will not download the dsl file for gcc to /mnt/hda, so i download to tmp and try to move it there after as super user. But it says that I don't have any space there! (the harddisk image is 60 megs, and gcc.dsl is around 15 i think . .. should be plenty of room)
so does it look like my best option is to install these things, then just add all of the directories to .filetool.lst ?
Or can we just bug the creators of dsl to provide a dl for a development iso?
Although, if someone were to help me remaster one, I could probably find somewhere to host it for others, or set up a torrent . . .
Thanks again for being so quick and courteous!
Posted by mgmont on July 18 2005,22:23
OK, marc_island, I guess I did not read your post close enough. Please bear with me as I am fairly new at using DSL myself. If I lead you astray, there are a lot of helpful and knowledgeable people like Ke4nt1 that will straighten me out and we will both learn. At any rate here is what I understand about "DSL under qemu".It was written to fit on a 128mb usb key. It is divided into two partitions hda and hdb roughly half is devoted to hda and the other half to hdb. In order to keep DSL apps, you need to create an directory called optional at the root of hdb. Also I found that I needed to modify the dsl-windows.bat file and add "dsl mydsl=hdb" within the append part of the start command so that the bat file looks like this:
REM Start qemu on windows.
@ECHO OFF
START qemu\qemu.exe -L qemu/ -enable-audio -localtime -kernel linux24 -initrd minirt24.gz -hda KNOPPIX/knoppix -hdb qemu/harddisk -append "qemu sb=0x220,5,1,1 frugal quiet dsl mydsl=hdb"
CLS
EXIT
If you start DSL with this bat file, you can move your downloaded dsl apps from /tmp to the root of hdb (/mnt/hdb) if you want them to auto install when you bootup next time or you can move them from /temp to /mnt/hdb/optional which will not install them at bootup, but will create a menu option where you can install them at will.
To my knowledge, all the files with .dsl extensions will work correctly this way. The thing that I was trying to explain in my first post is that if you down load something from Debian using apt-get which will not have the dsl extension, you may have supporting libraries and such also installed in addition to the application. Since you are trying to make a development system, I would suspect that you might want some of the Debian apps.
Also with the size of hdb only about 60mb, you might want to resize it to a larger size. I have not tried this myself, but there are write ups here in the forums that tell you how to do this.
I hope this explanation helps and I have not lead you to far astray.
Ke4nt1 or anyone else, please straighten me out and correct anything I may have wrong.
Good luck,
Mel
Posted by marc_island on July 18 2005,23:32
Sorry, I didn't mean to attack . . . I know *nothing* about dsl . . . (but I'm trying )ok, so I changed my bat file like you said and ran it. It started coming up with a bunch of errors about too many mount points. That, I can live with; so I press on.
One thing i notice is that i have to remount /mnt/hdb every time i boot . . .
and upon reboot, it has both the gcc.dal AND a backup file the same size . . . I assume the gcc.dsl has just been extracted from the backup file . . but is there any way to cut the disk usage in half?
the only other thing is that booting brings about a lot more warnings now that I have added those words to my bat file (too many mount points)
besides that, I now have a working development box
Thank you SO much for your assistance! so many of the other guides assumed dsl background knowledge
Posted by mgmont on July 18 2005,23:56
Glad we could be of some help. Since I have just recently started playing with DSL under qemu, I don't know what to tell you about the multiple mount points problem. Maybe someone else that reads this post can shed some light on this problem.The backup.tar.gz file is what stores your changes within the session for such things as firefox browser history, configuration changes, files that are entered in filetool.lst and other such things. So this file is necessary so that these things can be restored next time you boot up.