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Topic: cleaning up the root directory

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krazynesphreak Offline

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Posts: 49
Joined: May 2004

Posted: April 08 2005,18:45

what i would like to do is clean the root directory of my thumbdrive. i have dsl booting and working on the drive but its not very clean on the root directory, because of all the boot files. is there anyway i can change the MBR to boot into a directory?
thanks
ryan

choekstr

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Posts: 12
Joined: April 2005

Posted: April 11 2005,05:07

I was in this exact same situation and tried moving to directories. Let me explain my situation a bit first so you can adjust accordingly:
I use a common boot method of syslinux for HD/USB based booting, isolinux for CD-ROM booting, and pxelinux for pxe booting. All using the exact same image of about 7 images. (One of them being DSL)

When I went to put my common directory structure on my usb drive and use syslinux since it was HD based, I found a major major limitation in syslinux. It only supports 8.3 characters for ALL PATHS AND FILENAMES! ACK! So a directory /boot/dsl/linux24 would turn into /boot/ds.l/l when trying to boot! I tried all kinds of hacks, tried looking on syslinux's forums and eventually gave up.

What I ended up switching to was grub! And I like it soooo much better. While I was able to get by with using a windows machine the whole time for all my images and syslinux, I had to switch to creating my boot sector with linux. Not a big deal as I already have a linux box running grub.

The way I did it:
1.) Put the memory stick in the Fedora Core2 linux box (hot plugged)
2.) ran grub-install [--recheck] /dev/sda
3.) ran grub to get a grub> prompt
4.) typed setup /dev/sda

I played around with this quite a bit until I got it working, but the above commands are the consolidated steps one should need to do. I am not sure if the menu.lst/grub.conf file is copied over by setup as well as the stage1 and stage2 files as I was trying all kinds of things. :;):

Now that I am using grub, I can use 98% similar syslinux.cfg syntax, have nice scroll bar chooser, make kernel/initrd options on the fly, etc. MUCH MUCH nicer than syslinux/isolinux/pxelinux/memdisk are!
Plus the overlaid text on my sweet background (albeit 16 colors) looks pretty slick as well.

So, now I have:
/boot
/boot/grub (grub only files)
/boot/dsl (Damn Small Linux kernel24,minirt24.gz, knoppix folder)
/boot/<other images>

And my root directory only has a single /boot directory in it! Finally I can control where my kernels and my ram disk images are on my removable media images.

Hope this gives you enough of a push to try it out.

krazynesphreak Offline

Group: Members
Posts: 49
Joined: May 2004

Posted: April 12 2005,00:34

thanks choekstr, i will have to try this out
thanks very much

ryan

choekstr

Group: Members
Posts: 12
Joined: April 2005

Posted: April 13 2005,18:33

Well, this is causing a bit of trouble for me. I am 90% of the way there. I have grub working, all the directories, but when it finishes loading the kernel and the ramdisk, it wants to load the knoppix file in the knoppix directory, but it is a level deeper than it thinks. So while it wants (I assume): /knoppix/knoppix file, it really needs /dsl/knoppix/knoppix.

This is detailed over here in this thread http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....;t=5463
but so far noone has responded with anything but repartition so you can have the image in the root...thus negating the "cleaning up the root directory concept".

Still hopeful that someone will take the time to read and understand the issue as well as understand WHY having all files in the root directory is heinous to people. I think it is just a matter of telling the kernel/ramdisk/scripts to look elsewhere. Hopefully with just a kernel option...

krazynesphreak Offline

Group: Members
Posts: 49
Joined: May 2004

Posted: April 14 2005,10:00

i know what your tring to do. (i think) u want ever thing that has to do with booting in one directory? this is what i have done. in order for u to boot the knoppix image for within a directory named "dsl" or "DSL" u will have to rename the knoppix image as well to "dsl" and then edit the isolinux/syslinux file it should look like this

Quote

label dsl
kernel linux24
append ramdisk_size=100000 init=/etc/init lang=us apm=power-off vga=791 initrd=minirt24.gz nomce noapic quiet BOOT_IMAGE=DSL

now i have not done this by itself. this is what i did was boot multiple knoppix(es) like: dsl, knoppix, and knoppix-std and i had to rename the knoppix image as well as the directory as it was in.

"root /DSL/DSL" <----- the 2nd DSL being the image"
"root /DSL/{boot files}"

is this what u want?
later
ryan

8 replies since April 08 2005,18:45

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