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walterw
05-03-2003, 04:23 PM
Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to make a version of RedHat (7.3 and above) run on a live cdrom or dvdrom? I have checked out this site and others exactly like it, but I have yet to produce similar results as the site advertises. The site is:

http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue54/nielsen.html
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Diskless-HOWTO-3.html

I tried CoolLinux and SuperRescue, but those OS's never ran on my machines. The only one that did was Knoppix, but that is Debian based and I am looking at holding to the RedHat standard.

Walter

eadz
05-04-2003, 12:50 AM
Why Redhat?
You'll have to convert all the debian knoppix debs into rpms.

walterw
05-04-2003, 03:08 PM
I was not looking at converting Knoppix, but starting from scratch and building RedHat 9.0 live from some sort of standard as to how the system should start. Would you happen to know of any documentation that could point me in the right direction?


Thanks,
Walter

garyng
05-05-2003, 04:28 AM
mount the boot.img of KNOPPIX and have a look at the linuxrc in the miniroot.gz, also note the overall directory structure of it. That forms the basis of liveCD of KNOPPIX. For hardware detection see the /etc/rcS.d/S00* file after KNOPPIX has been booted.

probono
05-05-2003, 07:12 AM
The bootable Linux distro "TAHDER" is based on RedHat 8.0 and is essentially an out-of-the-box installation of RedHat made to fit and work on the CD. Not really Knoppix, but based on Knoppix technology in part (cloop).

Homepage and Download:
http://pcxperience.org/TAHDER/

walterw
05-05-2003, 06:08 PM
Thanks, I will try to find its source (without the cloop compression as it will be put on a DVD) I am still looking at starting from scratch with documentation. Does Knoppix have any general documentation for creating a live distro.


Thanks,
Walter

Henk Poley
05-06-2003, 07:22 PM
Thanks, I will try to find its source (without the cloop compression as it will be put on a DVD)
Why not? The compression actually speeds up the reading process (by a factor ~2.4, aka the compression ratio). And then you will be able to fit some 11GB of programs on the disk.

walterw
05-06-2003, 08:54 PM
The reason to put it on a DVD is that I would have the installer (1.8 gb), rescue image (2.5 gb), and the rest for software and updates. The rescue image will be a full-feautured RedHat distribution similar to my hard drive install. In the future, I would compress the data either with cloop or zisofs to make it fit on a cdr, but to get started, I need the system to at least to work without all of those fancy features.

Walter

Henk Poley
05-06-2003, 09:05 PM
The reason to put it on a DVD is that I would have the installer (1.8 gb), rescue image (2.5 gb), and the rest for software and updates. The rescue image will be a full-feautured RedHat distribution similar to my hard drive install. In the future, I would compress the data either with cloop or zisofs to make it fit on a cdr, but to get started, I need the system to at least to work without all of those fancy features.
I get that, compressing 11 gigabytes is a timely business...

But you seemed determined not to compress it (never). Which seemed dumb to me.

walterw
05-07-2003, 01:45 AM
What compression scheme is more efficient in your mind and why?

I just got SuperRescue working on my box. It is much slower compared to Knoppix, how does Klaus boot the thing so quickly? Knoppix boots just as fast as my harddrive install (RedHat 9.0). How different is Debian in the way things are run, I may consider running Debian from now on.


Walter

eadz
05-07-2003, 01:50 AM
I just got SuperRescue working on my box. It is much slower compared to Knoppix, how does Klaus boot the thing so quickly? Knoppix boots just as fast as my harddrive install (RedHat 9.0). How different is Debian in the way things are run, I may consider running Debian from now on

Yes, the thing is that having the data compressed on the CD makes it read faster, because it's faster to read say 400kb from the CD and uncompress it to 1Meg, than it is to read 1Meg uncompressed. This is becasue the CD read speed is the bottleneck in the whole process.

Debian is probally slightly faster than RedHat at booting. But you should consider running Debian for many more reasons than that... ( apt-get, way more available packages, easy upgrades .. etc etc )

walterw
05-07-2003, 01:37 PM
thanks for your take, for now, I will most likely do a remastering of the Knoppix cd to add custom software that I use. I believe that SuperRescue uses zisofs which compresses the data with a 2:1 ratio or so, I was not impressed at all with the speed that it booted with, but I liked the two things about it (it requires you to login upon startup, and kudzu for hardware detection) (this would be good to restrict access so that someone does not have total control of your computer). How does Klaus optimize the cd for speed when remastering it?

Another question, if I were to use cloop compression on making an iso image of mp3's (which are already compressed), would I get any compression out of them? If I could do that, I can pack nearly 2.0 gb of music on a cd and 12 gb on a dvd or so. CDROMs are in every computer just about so this would help make the distro run on any machine.

Thanks much,
Walter