Del
Group: Members
Posts: 109
Joined: Dec. 2003 |
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Posted: Feb. 29 2004,05:51 |
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Quick DSL Remastering Howto.
This is completely untested with the new 0.6.x series. I know it worked with
0.5.3. I offer no promises that this will work as desired/expected,
nor do I take any responsibility for any damage it may or may not cause
to you, your computer, your relationships, your cat, etc... In other words,
use this at your own risk. This howto is not endorsed by John, or any other
person who directly has anything to do with Damn Small Linux. It's just a
compilation of techniques gathered from the web by one DSL pseudo-user who
has enough computers and backups to not really care if any data is lost. It
is assumed that you already have some idea what you are doing. If that is not
true, please stop now and read some more forum posts and play with the default
DSL for a few weeks, then come back and try again.
First thing's first, you need 300+ Mb of free space on an existing ext2
partition. To do it right, I'd suggest no less than one Gb of free, formatted
ext2 space. For the remainder of this howto it will be assumed you have a
dedicated partition for remastering DSL located at /dev/hda1 (the first
partition of the first hard disk). You must be root to accomplish this project,
'sudo su' at a command prompt will suffice.
This has been tested on a machine with 256Mb of physical RAM, and about 500Mb
of swap space. I'd suggest having at least 128Mb physical RAM with an equal
amount of swap.
#mount /mnt/hda1
#cp -Rp /KNOPPIX /mnt/hda1/
#mount --bind /dev /mnt/hda1/KNOPPIX/dev
#chroot /mnt/hda1/KNOPPIX
#mount -t proc /proc proc
(do whatever it is you did to get your internet connection up and running on the LiveCD)
#dpkg-restore
#vi /etc/apt/sources.list
(change to testing branch)
-- add/remove packages, etc... --
#umount /proc
#ctrl-d
(press Ctrl and 'D' together, to un-chroot)
Make a new directory on /dev/hda1 called NewCD. Copy everything from the DSL CD
to this directory, _except_ for the KNOPPIX compressed image (since this is the
file we'll be replacing with the custom DSL remaster).
Create the compressed image file (your own custom KNOPPIX)
#mkisofs -R /mnt/hda1/KNOPPIX | create_compressed_fs - 65536 > /mnt/hda1/NewCD/KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX
Now it's time to create the CD image
#cd /mnt/hda1
#mkisofs -r -J -b KNOPPIX/boot.img -c KNOPPIX/boot.cat -o my_custom_DSL.iso NewCd
That's it! You've just whipped up your own custom Linux distribution, with a little
(okay, a lot of) help from other people  You can now burn this .iso image to a CD
and have a bootable LiveCD of your very own. Of course, if you want to test your
image first (that's probably a good idea) read on...
For testing, you must have a floppy drive for your computer to boot from. Make a boot
floppy from the boot.img you just used in your .iso.
#dd if=/mnt/hda1/KNOPPIX/boot.img of=/dev/fd0
This boot floppy will look for a KNOPPIX file in a /KNOPPIX partition on any partition
when booting up. Since we created a KNOPPIX compressed image in /dev/hda1/KNOPPIX/, that
will do just fine. Stick the floppy in the drive, and reboot the PC, taking care to remove
the Damn Small CD from the cdrom (so it'll boot from the floppy, not the cd).
If it boots up to your customized version of DSL, well, then things worked. If it doesn't,
reread this howto, make sure you're using a version of DSL that it's known to work with
(that'd be 0.5.3), and try again. If it still doesn't work, spit, stomp your feet, and
curse Del who is sitting back and saying "Well, it worked for me.".
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Del
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