Morphix release

Well, been working my *ss of (totally borked a number of CDRW's), but Morphix is becoming usable (with 2 mainmodules, and a number of mini's). Got a sf project page up, if anyone wants to help out just let me know.

If all goes well, i'll have some time this afternoon to start uploading iso's and modules to my mirror, interested if it meets up to expectations. Havn't included any changes of 20-1-2003 into the Basemodule, and it still hasn't any way to install to hdd, but it's coming along quite nicely, imho

Note: I've mentioned privately to a number of people Morphix would be a total rewrite, but i reconsidered and decided that building ontop of KnopBase/KNOPPIX would be a whole lot faster. sorry if i got your hopes up, but otherwise it would have taken 2 months(years?) instead of 2 weeks ;)

(oh yeah, i'll throw up some screenshots this evening, the XP-minimodule is really bad :D

seems your mirror is down.. may i sugest you use the sourceforge mirrors?

Mirror down?

ftp://dl.xs4all.nl/pub/mirror/drupal/Morphix works perfectly here, got the url wrong in my former post. It should work (anonymous ftp), uploading with 2MB/s ;)

Everything is uploaded now, also included tools.tar.gz, it has a modified compress-app, modified cloop, example commands and a personal cleaningscript for /var (wasnt satisfied with apt-get clean, i'll merge it with Knoppix.clean lateron).

Have fun! :D

PS. included is also the source, not that my modifications are that earthschokking :)

Just wondering if Morphix is on any other mirrors. I can't connect witj Gftp & I'm on dial-up so I need to be able to resume a download.

Thanx,
roadie

Roadie, you may want to use wget -> "wget -c ftp://..."
It works well. I had a flaky connection and lost net access dozens of times on a large file, but wget handled it fine without corrupting the data.

hmm, strange that some people are having problems, could you mail me the (g)ftp-output? It works perfectly here, but if there are problems i'll appreciate it if you can give me some feedback that i can pass on to xs4all...

Worked fine for me, but two quick questions, Alex.

Can I rawrite the boot.img to make the cd floppy bootable?

and

Is there any way to save changes to the environment, eg- floppyconfig?

Would that require a remaster?

Very fast, though...love it!

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Rixel

Worked fine for me, but two quick questions, Alex.

Can I rawrite the boot.img to make the cd floppy bootable?

---

IDHTFI (I dont have the foggiest idea :))

try it, let me know if it works. I'll have a look at it later today

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Rixel

and

Is there any way to save changes to the environment, eg- floppyconfig?

Would that require a remaster?

Very fast, though...love it!

---

I'm looking into persistant settings, but in this release there isn't a way. I might add it in a minimodule (floppy/hdd/cdr-multisession?)

great to hear that you like it, if you have more questions or ideas just let me know! :D

The only output from Gftp is "host not found"
I get the same with wget as well, Galeon, Mozilla connect fine, just can't resume a download

Thanx,
roadie

Try this:
ftp://194.109.6.22/pub/mirror/drupal/Morphix

Nope, I get name or service not known.

Hard to figure cause I connect fine to other ftp sites.

Thanx,
roadie

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by John

Try this:
ftp://194.109.6.22/pub/mirror/drupal/Morphix

---

works for me... both work for me now.

and just using dl.xs4all.nl as host, logging in with anonymous and making your way to the morphix folder manually? if that doesn't work i'd think you might be using a proxy of some sort, but the fact that other ftpservers do work seems quite strange...

Got me, I'm not using a proxy, I can connect w/ browsers & gftp connects to most other sites


roadie

and using plain ftp (ftp dl.xs4all.nl)?

Nope, tried all different names & layouts, just does'nt want to connect.
I'll keep working on my remaster, thanx for the help

roadie

Alex, I was able to create a boot floppy with the boot image on the cd. You may want to include rawrite with the next version.

Thanks,
Rixel

Good idea, i'll add them for the next upload. Thanks for trying it out!

In the mean time, i've started work on a HeavyGUI module, based on... Gnome2!

I've uploaded a screenshot, it doesn't have all that much more than light now, and it weighs in at 270MB. It includes, besides most of the lightGUI apps: Galeon + Mozilla, GNUCash, pan, xine, a few games (frozen-bubble returns! :D) and a few others i forgot. the die-hards can take a look at the module in the incoming dir (should finish uploading in about 10 hours), but it has quite a number of bugs (even more than lightGUI? yes, even more :D), so i don't recommend it.

Well, i've uploaded iso's in the incoming dir of my mirror. If anyone has some time left to test them, please help me out! :D

- lightGUI module is updated (added sudo, new version of icewm, Combined ISO)
- HeavyGUI module is working (Combined ISO)
- Gamersmodule is working (Combined ISO, still needs some work on the menus though)

I played with the lightGUI version, nice work! I could see you have put some time into it. Cool splash screen. Okay, now some critiquing...

I was missing my command line utilities within five minutes. I went to launch Mplayer and the gui didn't load. I figured it was a settings thing so I opened a term window and typed 'man mplayer' -- no man. So I wanted to find out what packages were installed so I typed 'dpkg -l | less' -- and there was no less....


I understand you are trying to make room for the likes of gnumeric, but the term utilities are a lot more important in my opinion.

Phoenix crashed when I tried a page with flash, that's probably a Phoenix bug and not yours. (Just fyi -- I went to look at the licence for the flash player. It looks like it is alright to redistribute)

More minor stuff, spell check would be nice for Abiword.

>Speed
It didn't really seem slower than knopNL.

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?

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 :D), 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

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...

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 :D). 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

[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 ;)

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

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

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!

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 :)

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 :D
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

Hey prp,

i'm busy with the latest release, that (hopefully) will be ready tomorrow with a new installer, having those files would be nice but i could use someone trying it out scsi-style :D

Have you tried installing knoppix with it btw?

Well, uploading Morphix 0.3 as i'm typing this, throwing it directly into the Morphix/ folder. Would be greatful to get some more feedback, especially for the installer (as i've only tested it on my own pc, don't be surprised if it gobbles up the cat :D)

I'll upload the seperate base/mainmodules tomorrow, or when i feel like it. Have fun, for the people new to morphix check www.morphix.org or download directly from ftp://dl.xs4all.nl/pub/mirror/drupal/Morphix



changelog:
13-02-2003 (version 0.3 base, light, heavy, game)
base:
- fresh kernel, minor bugs (wokay, forgot most things that i changed, sorry ;))

all main modules:
- morphix gtk installer (harddisk install for all! :o)
- console installer available for light+game as backup
- added alt-f2, f3 etc rootconsoles
- added generic minimodule support (ALL-tag)
- put back /etc/skel support, added defaults for all modules in mainmod/etc/skel
- added that it doesn't automagically reboot (must add icewm-reboot though)
- fixed minor loadmod/init bugs (+ automount support?)
- added ssh

light:
- new default theme+background
- xchat 2, number of minor updates

heavy:
- new default metacity theme
- added wine, you never know...
- xchat 2

game:
- fixed that it actually could work with nvidia (or any other card, for that matter)
- new default theme+background
- added pingus, gxmame

Alex,

I look forward to the new release. I will be happy to try the new Morphix/installerinstaller against SCSI. This time I will move the lilo.conf and fstab to another box to send to you. Let me know if there are any other files installed to the hd that you'd like to see.

And No, I haven't tried knoppix, I don't need 90% of the stuff in it.

thanks again for your efforts! :D

-Pratik

PS: which time zone are you in? I havent spotted you online on MSN messenger, I had some q's about how you are putting morphix together... please IM me on MSN messenger... my MSN id is [email protected]... BTW I am in London, UK.

Well, i'm mostly online during the evenings, but i'm almost never on MSN. If i remember to i'll boot it up this evening, but you are always free to ask me on IRC, there is a #knoppix channel on freenode.net that i'm idling on (and you can always mail me :D)

Now about 0.3, Light works okay but there are a few issues with Heavy:

- the GTK Morphixinstaller and Knoppix.net/Morphix.org links on the desktop have fanished, to start the installer: sudo /morphix/gtkinstaller/morphixinstaller

- openoffice doesn't start up, rm ~/.sver-something to boot.

I'll upload a fixed version tomorrow, it works okay except for these issues. Game remains untested as of now ;)

Hi Alex,
Morphix HeavyGUI 0.3 is gnome 2.2 or 2.0???
Detect Radeon video cards?
HeavyGUI include xine?

While I was hacking at Morphix-base today, two neurons fired off at the same time, and I had a great idea... I actually tried this, so it does work ;)

***** The only thing new here is the way to 'remaster' the build AND TEST the build before rolling it out (using chroot and apt-get)

***** Note that the _base_ is changed, not a module itself

***** Apologies to Alex for hacking his fine work and his docs :shock:

***** This can NOT be done if you have booted from a Knoppix/Morphix CD.. it has to be done while running Linux from HD
Here it is - CUSTOM MORPHIX/KNOPPIX MAKER

- Unpack MorphixBase-UK-0.2.iso
> mount -o loop MorphixBase-UK-0.2.iso /mnt/virtualcd1
> cp -R /mnt/virtualcd1/* /tmp/boot-img

- Start with the base ISO image (base/Morphix), uncompress + copied to a temp dir, let's say /tmp/CustomMorphix
> extract_compressed_fs /tmp/boot-img/base/morphix > /tmp/CustomMorphix
> mount -t proc proc /tmp/CustomMorphix/proc
> cd /tmp/CustomMorphix/
> chroot ./

- Now that we are in the chroot 'jail' we can run most commands
just as if we were inside a 'live' morphix environment

- to customize the environment, run the normal commands while in the chroot environment
> apt-get update
> apt-get install vim
> apt-get install emacs
> ETC
- test while in the chroot environment
> emacs file.txt
> vi file.txt
> ETC

- to get out of the chroot environment
> exit
> CNTRL-D

- make sure you do this before proceeding
> umount /tmp/CustomMorphix/proc

- now we simply need to repack the base ISO image as a compressed iso9660 fs
> mkisofs -R -U -V "MyMorphix" -P ""MyMorphix" " -hide-rr-moved -cache-inodes -no-bak -pad /tmp/CustomMorphix| nice -5 create_compressed_fs - 65536 > /tmp/boot-img/base/morphix

-now we create the bootable Morphix/Knoppix CD image
> cd /tmp
> mkisofs -pad -l -r -J -v -V "MyMorphix"-b base/boot.img -c base/boot.cat -hide-rr-moved -o mymorphix.iso boot-img

- write mymorphix.iso to CD, run and enjoy.

I understand the benefit in the 'modular' way that Morphix does things, using a MainMod and MiniMod(s), and I believe this is a good thing. I thought I would post my work so far so others can better understand how Morphix/Knoppix work...

-Pratik

prp,

Heh, i didn't have apt-get in base for nothing, it's derived from my knopBase and is 'live' enough to build on (that was the point of knopBase :D). It's whole purpose was to give people the possibility to build their own knoppix-based distro, and, although i'd rather see a new main-module, everyone is free to build on base for their own hideous creations :D

Why keep the modular system then, you may ask? Beacuse i was working on two remastered versions, and realised that i was doing double work updating it. Morphix needs getting used to, but it saves work in the long run. For the ones still baffeled at all this morphix-mumblejumble:

http://am.xs4all.nl/phpwiki/index.php/WtfIsMorphix

So prp, don't be sorry, i'm sorry i didn't point it out clear enough! :P

archtron,

Heavy 0.3 includes Gnome2.2 (0.2 did aswell though).
It should detect Radeon, but i don't have one to test it out on. As a rule of thumb: If knoppix works on it, then morphix will work. If it doesn't work on knoppix, let me know and i might make a mini-module to fix things for you (made msmouse-minimodule for people with usb-problems)
and yes, Heavy also includes xine :)

Hello Alex,
Using Knoppix I made a file xf86config for my Radeon VE but I don't know how initiating it in each session. If you could do a module for Morphix to initiate with that file instead of vesa. The section "Monitor" is for my monitor, could to be more generic.
Thanx for all :)

Hey archtron,

Well, i've uploaded a minimodule generator script to hopefully help in letting you fix problems yourself ;)

http://am.xs4all.nl/morphix/minimod-gen.pl

note that for this to work properly, you need to have the adapted cloop-utils installed from http://am.xs4all.nl/morphix/debs . Also, you need to run it as root (it uses mkisofs to build a compressed loop module)

It's still pretty immature and mostly untested (you can only define what file gets copied where on loading), but it's a nice starting point. I'll probably include a simple menu-adding tool, linking options instead of only copying, and hopefully slowly working towards generating more complicated modules (like from .deb, now that will be a challenge :D)

When do you think to make available a MorphixCombined-KDE3.1-HeavyGUI & MorphixCombined-KDE3.1-LGUI :?:
With things like: hdinstall, wine, phoenix, nvidia drivers… with no fancy geek’s :shock: things

The KDE Morphix will be a must for us, do you know that :?:

Its just we are not all geeks :shock: and gnome lovers, but love your existing work and becoming Aficionado :D

Ciao. Awaken The Giant In You 8)