YAKRS (Yet another Knoppix-Remaster-Script)

[Capricorny]

There should be no compatibility problems because its more or less a copy of the original C implementation - and of course the Cloop format is very simple:

1. Headroom (128 bytes) with a shell script for mounting
2. Blocksize of an uncompressed block (unsigned int - network order)
3. Number of blocks (unsigned int - network order)
4. Offsets for the compressed blocks (unsigned long long - network order)

No chance of compatibility problems? Beautiful!

I developed this more with an windows user in mind who wants to customize his live system.
But I think it would be useful for us command line junkies too.

Sure it can be useful. And the more, the better the opportunities in the concept are used.

So you mean the script should do all these things automatic?
So the user says for example: "clean Knoppix" and the script will remove all software except the init and the other stuff?

Yes. Stripping down and then rebuilding is very often the way to go. Stripping down is about purging a lot of packages, and there could be, say, 3-5 standard selections of what to keep. Plus alternative 0: The empty selection, leaving only booting. First and most basic choice is a set of utilities, like what is implemented in current busybox. Plus networking etc. Next step up might be terminals and communications, and third step might be graphics, up to and including LXDE.

[maxi_king_333]

Yes. Stripping down and then rebuilding is very often the way to go. Stripping down is about purging a lot of packages, and there could be, say, 3-5 standard selections of what to keep. Plus alternative 0: The empty selection, leaving only booting. First and most basic choice is a set of utilities, like what is implemented in current busybox. Plus networking etc. Next step up might be terminals and communications, and third step might be graphics, up to and including LXDE.

Sounds good, could be done with some checkboxes where the user could decide what to keep and what to remove. Also with some requirement system beetween the different checkboxes. For example the checkbox "office software (libreoffice...)" requires the "basic graphical environment" checkbox. There is also some basic handling for various Knoppix versions in the script already so the selection of software to remove and to keep could be different for different Knoppix versions. I will see what I can do but I think I would need some help .

[Capricorny]

When we have safe and stable ways of doing it "manually", it may be automated more. May have to do some adaptations to the package structure to make it efficient, though. For example, some crucial Knoppix packages are not apt-downloadable, had a few of them purged by aptitude yesterday wthout me asking for it.

I got down to about 1660 packages by systematic, mostly group-wise purging of 7.0.2 DVD. Will see how much space they will take up when remastered, but I doubt there is very much use in going for a very low basic package count for the graphics version. Another alternative could be to use the package selection in business card version of ordinary Debian 6.0X.

I will try to carry out this purging running Knoppix in a virtual machine next time. Qemu-kvm is quite nice when we are friends and I don't try too hard to direct its workings. But don't use qemu without kvm, way too slow for realistic use!