Morphix release

**Alextreme** · 01-28-2003, 12:01 PM

Thanks for your extensive post, your testing and your critique!

it is true that gmplayer didn't load with the former versions, could you test it with the latest version? It was just some permission problem in the theme-folder, thought i had fixed that one. Could you mail me the cmdline output? (just start it with gmplayer)

I understand your critique on the commandline utilities, and you are right! The idea was to have everything GUI-only, but for testing reasons including commands like less would be handy. I'll think it over, have to find a balance between commandline and GUI tools, but there stil is 30MB compressed space left (goal was 200MB) for these kind of problems.

I did remember including flash, never tested it though *shame*. Great to see you looked into the license, forgot all about it. I'll try to get a working version up tomorrow, i'll take a look into spellchecking too.

And about the speed, i've never clocked it. It just seemed that with the increased overhead it just had to be slower, but instead i get reports that it's actually faster than KnopNL. Maybe it's because of increased ramdisk usage?
Still have a few tricks to make it go even faster, but first i'm diverting some time to have some sort of preliminary hdd-install-method and better documentation (placed a few HOWTO's and a modified cloop-utils deb)

In other news, i've added HeavyGUI to the 'official' iso-section, it worked quite nicely here. The GameModule did have a few problems, i'll upload that one again. all updated iso's and modules have been changed to version 0.1-1

BTW, Does anyone know what's the status of the nvidia modules? are these free-to-distribute?

**Alextreme** · 01-31-2003, 11:13 AM

Well, yet another morphix update:
added an adapted knx-hdinstall (dialog-based only for now, working on something gtk2 based as i find (g)dialog not suited for anything more complicated than popping up a question, take a look if you feel like risking it) to light (in the menu), fixed a few bugs (yet not the flash bug, and havn't looked at spellcheck, been a bit busy messing up my system with the installer

), added a few apps and console tools, the regular bladieblabla...

Also started a wiki on morphix.org, if you have bugs or wishes throw them up there, as i tend to forget to check the forum while i'm busy

**dvessey** · 02-01-2003, 02:14 AM

I was thinking about Morphix a bit, and a new idea struck me... why not instead of loading one compressed ISO(knop base) and then another(a module), make a directory for modules, and then at boot up have a choice of which compressed ISO you want to load off of the CD? This would get rid of the chroot work-around.

This next part might not be clear, so let me know if you don't understand...

if you still wanted to have the configuration all do ne, could you add that stuff to boot.img? any idea how big boot.img can get? _OR_ could boot.img just re-direct to another boot image that's bigger?

I have no idea if this would make any sense or not...

**Alextreme** · 02-01-2003, 04:59 PM

Great idea, but alas, the first one has been in Morphix since the start, partially...

You can put more than one main module in the /mainmod dir, at booting it will give you the choice which one to load. It's not anything fancy yet, and i havn't tested it all too much, but with the latest Morphix base 0.1-2 it should work afaik with multiple mainmods.

Now, having more than one base on a CD should be an option in the future, i was working in this direction to have different translated basemodules. The idea however, was to let base handle configuration and booting, and then jumpstart the main module.

Your idea is to combine the base and main module would be workable, but then morphix wouldn't be as modular (and that was the whole point

). Having one base and multiple main's decreases the changes i have to make to the configuration and detection process, and people working on main modules don't have to worry about configuration and booting. Now, everyone is following KNOPPIX' changes, while this could be done by one person, while others work on the things that really matter: building useable enviroments. You might curse the chrooted-way how i've 'solved' it, but i see it as a more effective way to create multiple enviroments (and the overhead is small, both in memory as in cdrom-space).

I do understand your second idea: saving the detected configuration would be quite handy. Fitting it in boot.img seems a bit messy, a third option would be to have boot.img check for a third kind of module (BootMods? StartupMods?) in about the same fashion as main and mini modules are detected after loading base and main. Within such a module you could save configuration and an adapted bootscript, and it could be located on the cdrom like the other modules.
boot.img is the size of a floppy (1440kb), and it's quite maxed out now as it is. having it boot another image is already done: as it boots the base compressed ISO

Oh, in other news: a friend has built a perl script to ease the creation of combining multiple modules into one ISO, i've linked it on the morphix wiki. It does need testing though... :P

**Alextreme** · 02-04-2003, 06:24 PM

[plug]

Yes people, i'm bothering you all again, uploaded 0.2 today:

changelog (base, light, heavy, game)
- added new kernel (using 2.88 image, 1.44 bootflop image still in the base/ dir)
- added abiword spellcheck to light (+ gtk2 version), english only
- added AA + fonts to light
- added nvidia drivers to game
- added wireless support (hopefully) to kernel
- and updated each module.

get it while it's hot at the mirror, for more info check www.morphix.org

[/plug]

[edit] Oh, has alsa too. Seems to work nicely, but like always: you test, i break

**RockMumbles** · 02-08-2003, 08:40 AM

a friend gave me a mobo and a 630 MB hd yesterday so I put together some spare parts and was running knoppix from cd using the hd for storage and swap. I had been thinking about running a smaller version. A week or so I had down loaded the heavy GUI Morphix which was the best gnome 2.x setup I've ran, I had a few problems with it, but it sure looked nice.

So today I down loaded the 0.2 "lgui+mini" Morphix iso, and did a hd install on the 630MB drive, it doesn't have much space left but it runs good, I'm going to loan it out as a demo linux box.

The only problem is that it looks so good ... the default icewm theme, the aa fonts, etc, who could ever go back ...

The only thing I miss is an easy way to mount the cd-rom and floppy (for non-linux types) with icewm (that's why I used to run gmc in my office with icewm so my boss could use it easily).

great job, thanks much,

rock

**Alextreme** · 02-08-2003, 06:13 PM

Thanks for your remarks!

Could you place those problems that you had with heavy on the bug-page? I'm mostley playing around with light, so bugs can always slip in, i just need to know what/where they are so i can get them out on the next release

since the earliest versions i've included idesk, so mounting could be done through an icon (or i could add that automount support i had removed, that would be better

). Oh, and i'm replacing gentoo with gmc in light, as everyone i've asked didn't (want to) use gentoo, can't blame them...

btw, you're using the aqua theme? It's nice, but it's not the default (yet). Ii'm thinking about making light+heavy+game all aqua-themed (default gnome 2.2 is a bit boring), although i don't really like the icewm aqua-taskbar.

Oh, and before anyone tries, i think the new gamemod might not work with nvidia cards, f*cked something up, sorry :P

**prpatel** · 02-11-2003, 09:02 PM

Hello,

I can not get Morphix lgui, installed to the HD, to boot. The CD boots fine. I am able to run the knx-hdinstall to run fine (it shows version 0.37 btw). Some messages flash by very quickly, but I am unable to see them as the curses(?)-based GUI quickly refreshes and wipes out the messages.

I tried
knx-hdinstall 1 > /var/log/installlog
and
knx-hdinstall 2 > /var/log/installlog

but neither show the messages I see when running the installer...

Anyhow, I run through the installer. On rebooting from the HD, I notice these two errors:
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem)
kmod: failed to exec /sbin/modprobe -s -k block-major-8, errno=2
VFS: Cannot open root device "801" or 08:01
Please append a correct "root=" boot option
Kernel Panice: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 08:01

I've spent a good many hours on this now, and I can't figure out what is wrong. The lilo.conf looks fine, it is pointing to the right drive /dev/sda1.
I've also tried formatting the / fs as xfs and ext2... no luck... each time the fstab has the correct fs type but still does not work.

If anyone can help, that would be great!

**Alextreme** · 02-12-2003, 01:03 AM

Hmm, i did adapt knx-hdinstall 0.37 for morphix, but it wasn't meant to be any more than a quick (temporary) fix (that, and it's not heavily tested, you're the first to try it with scsi afaik :P)
to make matters worse, the installkernel of lGUI-0.2 only has ext2 builtin, so only ext2/3 can work (these all should, hopefully, be fixed when the next light is released, including a more-or-less working gtk installer)

what could have gone wrong? to be honest i don't have the foggiest idea, could you post or email me your lilo.conf and fstab? it might be some small bug that slipped in there somewhere...

Sorry for the problems, hope things will work out

**prpatel** · 02-12-2003, 11:11 AM

Hello Alex,

This morning, before reading your message, I tried installing against a IDE drive (isn't VMWare great?)... and it worked great. I can boot from hda1 with no problems.

I agree that this may have something to do with the SCSI, but I don't know enough of lilo/booting Linux to understand what could have gone wrong. Here's a question: from the short list of boot messages I sent you, do you think it found the kernel and started booting? To me, it looks like it did, as the previous messages, during booting, said the system found the ide/cdrom, scsi _controller_ etc...

OH, I don't have the lilo.conf or fstab, as I nuked the install and now have one thats working

But I can recreate the errors if you like, and dig out the two files and send them along... but I just checked the two files in my current HD build, and they are identical to the ones under the SCSI build, except, of course s/hda/sda/g:

fstab-----------------------------------
# /etc/fstab: filesystem table.
#
# filesystem mountpoint type options dump pass
/dev/hda1 / ext2 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/hda5 none swap sw 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/fd0 /floppy vfat defaults,user,noauto,showexec,umask=022 0 0
/dev/cdrom /cdrom iso9660 defaults,ro,user,noexec,noauto 0 0
# partitions found by Morphix

lilo.conf---------------------------------
boot=/dev/hda
vga=791
prompt
timeout=50
append = "hda=scsi hdb=scsi hdc=scsi hdd=scsi hde=scsi hdf=scsi hdg=scsi hdh=scsi apm=power-off nomce"

image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.20-xfs
label=morphix
root=/dev/hda1
read-only

## A Windows installation, example for partition 1 on first IDE harddisk
# other=/dev/hda1
# label=dos
# optional
# table=/dev/hda

once again, these config files were EXACTLY the same except that hda=sda. I had cfdisk'd both drives (scsi and ide) the same (*da1= Primary bootable Linux ext2 700M, *da5= Logical Linux swap 300M).

cheers
prp