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Topic: (yet another) remastering newbie, some things i havent been able to find

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jakethesnake Offline

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Posts: 9
Joined: April 2007

Posted: April 08 2007,21:53

OK first i apologize if this subject already appears five times a day on the forum. I have read a handful of guies on remastering, and, although i have to admit that most of the just confuse me, there is one basic thing that i havent seen asked or answered by anyone else.

I run DSL boxes now and then. It's often quite temporary machines so i just pop in a CD there and do what i have to do. They are often headless, i.e. no monitor.

Anyhow, there are some things i almost always do, so i figured i'd like to have those things baked into a DSL image somehow, so i dont have to do them manually.

One of those is starting the SSH daemon. There is a cheat code for that in the startup, but theres one problem left: even if i figure out how to have my cheatcodes registered into the image, sshd still needs a real user. I cant connect to the machine before i've set up a root password.

In other words: can i remaster DSL so that i have either a root PW or a real user account, with PW?

mikshaw

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Joined: July 2004

Posted: April 08 2007,22:37

Set up a root password, and then use the newly modified /etc/shadow file in your remaster.

The default cheatcodes are set in the isolinux.cfg file (check the boot/isolinux directory on the cd)

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http://www.tldp.org/LDP/intro-linux/html/index.html

jakethesnake Offline

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Joined: April 2007

Posted: April 09 2007,14:51

OK! Thanks a lot!

Do you think i could also set up a normal account, like "jake", and use the /etc/shadow file in the same way?

Also, i have to ask you which remastering-guide you would reccommend for me. Or, let me ask like this: are there more than one way to skin this cat? I would like to do this as easily as possible, as i'm a newbie to remastering. So i'm looking for the simplest method of doing this.

The means i have of disposal are: a PC with cdrom, and a harddrive connected to it... FAT drive mainly for file storage, but i could format it if necessary. The PC is connected to a samba network, and i have CDburners on other computers in the network, so if i can get an ISO file from the live-DSL-machine, i could burn it elsewhere. The DSL-machine has 256 mb RAM.

peace

mikshaw

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Posts: 4856
Joined: July 2004

Posted: April 09 2007,17:41

If you create a new user with a password, you will also need to include the modified /etc/passwd file in your remaster.

There are multiple ways to remaster. I couldn't recommend one above another, since it depends on what is most comfortable for you. Personally I have done it this way:

Mount KNOPPIX
Copy the mounted files to a writable directory (keeping file permissions and ownership intact...can be done easily with mc as root)
Make changes
Rebuild KNOPPIX file

That method is only dependable if your changes consist of manually adding/removing/editing files, since it does not mention chroot or /proc

Using a FAT (or any non-linux) partition during a remaster is not a good idea. This filesystem does not know how to handle Linux file permissions and ownership.

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An alternative to remastering the filesystem, though, is to remaster only the ISO. You can add myDSL packages and other files this way, which can be loaded during boot. One of these files can be a knoppix.sh script, which can be used if there are things that need to be done before the DSL-specific init script is run. Remastering only the ISO also allows you to change the default boot options so you don't need to type your personal boot string each time you load DSL.

This is my preferred method of customizing a DSL CD. It is essentially the same method used for customizing a frugal harddrive install. It also allows for much easier upgrades, since you do not have to remaster KNOPPIX every time a new version is released. The downside is that you do not have the option of replacing or removing existing applications or other files in the read-only portions of the filesystem.

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http://www.tldp.org/LDP/intro-linux/html/index.html

jakethesnake Offline

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Posts: 9
Joined: April 2007

Posted: April 10 2007,05:42

Uhmm..... OK....
so i realized that i dont know much about the DSL CD's structure.
So i downloaded the latest ISO and mounted it with Daemon Tools, to take a look inside.

Seems its mainly a handful of files, a megabyte or so, in a directory, and then a big image of some sort, KNOPPIX. Is that image also an ISO image? That would mean an ISO inside the ISO.

I understand the problem with the FAT and the file attributes. Maybe i could do this all in RAM, since i'm on 256 megabytes? Or is that too little?

Unfortunately i didnt understand what you meant under the equal-signs in your post there. In other words, i didnt understand the difference between remastering the filesystem, and remastering only the ISO.

About boot options:
In the isolinux.cfg file, is it the first line:
DEFAULT linux24
that i want to change into something else in order to get the "toram", the "ssh", and the "2" switch?

peace

17 replies since April 08 2007,21:53

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