Remastering with gtk2

Forum: Gtk2
Topic: Remastering with gtk2
started by: spock

Posted by spock on Feb. 28 2006,00:13

Hi there !

Maybe I'll find the solution to this alone but I thought it might be an interesting topic to share...

So here's the problem : I have a frugal install of DSL 2.2b with ten extensions loaded at boot. XFree86 (with the driver for my touchpad), gtk2, gkrellm, extra fonts, myconf.tar.gz and my own Firefox 1.5 and Thunderbird extensions in French. Uncompressing all this during boot takes about a minute, so I thought it might be a good idea to do a remaster. To cut shorter the boot time and avoid loading by default .dsl extensions. Now this is what I did :

Boot dsl from frugal with cheatcodes 2 base norestore vga=792 nodhcp toram
#mount -rw /dev/hda6 /mnt/hda6 (my Ubuntu home partition with lots of free space)
#mount /dev/hda3 /mnt/hda3 (with mydsl extensions)
#mkdir /mnt/hda6/source
#mkdir /mnt/hda6/new
#mkdir /mnt/hda6/new/KNOPPIX
#cp -Rp /KNOPPIX/* /mnt/hda6/source
#cp -Rp KNOPPIX/.bash_profile /mnt/hda6/source
Copied my extensions from /mnt/hda3 to /mnt/hda6/source/home/dsl
#chroot /mnt/hda6/source
#cd /home/dsl
#su dsl
Loaded all extensions with mydsl-load
$exit (user dsl)
#exit (the chroot)
Deleted the extensions in source/home/dsl
#mkisofs -R /mnt/hda6/source | create_compressed_fs - 65536 > /mnt/hda6/new/KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX
Deleted the source directory and replaced the original KNOPPIX file with the new one.

This took about 20 minutes, I wanted something I can do quickly with every new release of DSL.

As I expected the boot time has been cut down by almost a minute, and everything works fine except the fonts in Gtk2 applications look horrible. My .xinitrc did /usr/bin/start_gtk2 I could see it on the screen just before X started, but...

Is anyone here doing something similar, or has an idea of what could be wrong ?

Thanks

Posted by clivesay on Feb. 28 2006,01:30

I've greated a gtk2 version of DSL 1.5 in the past. I recommend you run the start_gtk2 in the chroot environment then it never needs to be run again.

Chris

Posted by spock on Mar. 01 2006,10:19

Thanks a lot Chris for pointing to that. However running start_gtk2 in the chroot was only part of the solution. I had to create the symlinks to my font paths there as well :

ln -s /opt/msttcorefonts/TrueType /usr/share/fonts/msttcorefonts

and so forth. It's all logical because /usr is now read-only.

For everyday use this is Devine Small Linux ! Thanks a lot again to John and Robert.

Thierry

Posted by winga on Mar. 14 2006,20:32

Thanks for this helpful posts. I have a question though. I tried doing a similar thing but I want it to actually boot xfree by default. I was wondering how you handled that along with the config file for it. I was also thinking of writing a script or something that loads the correct xfree based on the video card. That would come later. For now I just want to set it up to take off with my nvidia. I tried hack'n the xsetup.sh file up some but I didn't get it right.

Posted by clivesay on Mar. 14 2006,21:38

Thanks for the tip on the fonts. I had never added those fonts to a remaster before so that's helpful.

Chris

Posted by spock on Mar. 19 2006,00:41

Hi there,

Winga I don't really understand your question. There's nothing special about booting by default in XFree. I just followed the instructions in the info file :

< XFree86.dsl.info >

For choosing an XF86Config-4 I guess you could create your own cheat codes by editing linuxrc. I didn't do that.

Cheers.

Posted by humpty on Mar. 20 2006,10:06

All that work just so's to save 1 minute of uncompressing?
(it takes at least twice longer than that to boot win2K

).

Seriously, if uncompressing takes too long, I think it might be easier to have some script to convert a compressed mydsl to
an uncompressed mydsl. I dunno if it'll work (have to look up
the gzip docs) but I think it'll save the same amount of time and use up the same amount of space on your hard drive. Simpler than re-mastering no?