By making substantial use of KNOPPIX-DATA on a reiserfs formatted /dev/sda3 I have managed to customise KNOPPIX at boot pretty well as preferred.
However: one final (almost trivial) alteration eludes me.
I would like to tweak the boot init executable file which I think is the one that resides in minirt.gz.
Using a temporary ext2 filesystem as my vehicle for managing this:
1) copy minirt.gz to temp and de-compress minirt.gz using gunzip: this yields a file minirt
2) move to a dofferent subdirectory under temp and extract minirt here with the command cpio -idm < {pathto}/minirt
3) the init file is seen here: edit it - (I'm just tweaking the messages sent to screen at boot) - and save it
4) chmod a+x init and chmod a+w init, as originally found
5) wrap the while thing as a revised minirt to a different subdirectory under temp using find . | cpio -o > {newpathto}/minirt
6) compress the new minirt using gzip --recursive --rsyncable (not sure whether either switch is actiually required)
and finally
7) save the old minirt.gz as minirt.orig.gz in case of failure (see below!)
8 ) copy the new minirt.gz to replace the original.
Then reboot, hoping for success.
But actually get failure at boot with the error message:
"kernel panic - not syncing - unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)"
I feel I'm almost there at my ideal customised KNOPPIX, and without the hugely complex time-consuming and likely error-prone process of re-mastering.
Has anybody else tried this easier approach and successfully replaced minirt.gz with their own version?
Thank you for any insight or refined practice for 1-8 above .. ..
Dell PowerEdge R720 Server - 2x8c CPU,256Gb RAM, 128Gb SSD/3x900Gb SAS, Proxmox
$340.00
Supermicro 4U 36 Bay Storage Server 2.4Ghz 8-C 128GB 1x1280W Rails TrueNAS ZFS
$712.98
DELL PowerEdge R730XD 24x 2.5" Server Dual 750W Dual Heatsink - BareBones TESTED
$269.99
HP ProLiant DL360 G9 Server 2x E5-2660v3 2.60Ghz 20-Core 96GB P440ar
$304.35
Dell PowerEdge R620 Server 2x E5-2660 v1 2.2GHz 16 Cores 256GB RAM 2x 300GB HDD
$89.99
Dell PowerEdge R730XD 28 Core Server 2X Xeon E5-2680 V4 H730 128GB RAM No HDD
$389.99
HP Proliant DL360 Gen9 28 Core SFF Server 2X E5-2680 V4 16GB RAM P440ar No HDD
$196.95
HP ProLiant DL360 G9 2x Xeon E5-2690 V3 24 Cores 2.6GHz P440ar 32GB DDR4
$119.99
DELL PowerEdge R730 Server 2x E5-2680v4 2.4GHz =28 Cores 32GB H730 4xRJ45
$284.00
PowerEdge R710 Rackmount Server 80GB RAM 2x XEON E5520 CPU 4.75TB
$200.00