Remastering - The easy way

[johnrw]

tapsa,
First, thanks for making it easy to get those scripts in your deb.

I gathered that I should be booted from the CD/DVD so I did that and then refused mounting my persistent home when asked. (I usually boot from a bootable knoppix DVD on an 8GB usb thumb drive now that they are cheap.)

After I installed the package... I ran it and picked a directory I had made before running knoppix-remaster as root, on an 20GB ext3 partition. That would be /media/hdb5/remaster. I had told it to create a new remaster there.

I ran knoppix-remaster and I picked the first, then second, and then third options.
The first one made a long copy process. No error was reported there.
/media/hdb5/remaster/KNOPPIX.build/Knoppix.Master/KNOPPIX-CUSTOM/KNOPPIX has the files which are going to be compressed into iso. It seems to have everything I would expect to see in such a target.

But the curious thing is the KNOPPIX file.
301 bytes. The first part of the file is...
#!/bin/sh
#V2.0 Format
modprobe cloop file=$0 && mount -r -t iso9660 /dev/cloop $1
exit $?
with some binary bytes following that.


So I looked at the files and Knoppix-3.4.mkcompressed defines some environment vars pointing to files that do not exist.

CDRECORD=/KNOPPIX.build/cdrecord
MKISOFS=/KNOPPIX.build/genisoimage
BOOTSRC=/KNOPPIX.build/Knoppix.System/bootdisk/Knoppix3.4

Should the deb have installed those? There is no Knoppix.System at all for instance.
I will probably just try and copy those files to KNOPPIX.build/ and try again.

cheers!

[johnrw]

Well I copied those files to /media/hdb5/remaster/KNOPPIX.build/ and got a little further along. Now I have a huge iso file.
Here is what make iso says at the end...
Total translation table size: 2048
Total rockridge attributes bytes: 10277
Total directory bytes: 36296
Path table size(bytes): 262
Max brk space used 21000
1035723 extents written (2022 MB)

Well it doesn't seem to be zipping anything. It only takes about 3 minutes to do too!
Bummer. This was also strange... I hope I don't need -publisher instead. I'll check that next.
I'm also not using /KNOPPIX.build but one buried deeper into /media/hdb5/remaster/KNOPPIX.build.

Checksumming...Done.
/KNOPPIX.build/genisoimage: The option '-P' is reserved by POSIX.1-2001.
/KNOPPIX.build/genisoimage: The option '-P' means 'do not follow symbolic links'
/KNOPPIX.build/genisoimage: Mkisofs-2.02 will introduce POSIX semantics for '-P'
/KNOPPIX.build/genisoimage: Use -publisher in future to get old genisoimage behavior
Unknown file type (unallocated) /KNOPPIX.build/Knoppix.Master/KNOPPIX-CUSTOM/.. - ignoring and continuing
Size of boot image is 4 sectors -> No emulation

[johnrw]

Ok well since I did boot from the DVD maybe it is supposed to be that big... so I'll go ahead and try a burn even though I did not try and make a KNOPPIX2 cloop file or even manually copy the files in it to the source image files. Here goes nuthin... lol

[johnrw]

Well I'll be darned... It was all okay. I am booted into my new Knoppix, with my slight changes... Wow.

I only did this so I could try out a couple of bug fixes...
1. I removed pump from the BLACKLIST of processes that get left running in knoppix-halt. It leaves some open files that cause a fsck on my persistent home on every boot I use it.
2. I am trying out a patch offered to automount a persistent home if it finds one. Well see.

I just wanted to let others who come along know what I found wrong with it as I did it.

Thanks again tapsa.