Quoting Ed Schouten <e...@80386.nl>:
Hello all,A couple of major releases ago, we had a FreeBSD disc1.iso which also included the livefs. Nowadays the livefs comes on a separate disc. This livefs disc has a couple of issues in my opinion: - The livefs disc does not feature any installsets, which means if your system has 1 CD-ROM drive, you have to resort to network connectivity to obtain the installsets to perform a manual install. - The livefs installation places everything in /dist and does some odd tricks to get the basic things working, which means that any tool that assumes a specific pathname doesn't work anymore. I remember the GEOM tools were once broken because of this. You also have to add symlinks here and there to make something as simple as scp(1) work, because the ssh(1) binary is in the wrong place. I think I already mentioned it on some of the lists, but I've spent some time creating a better FreeBSD live CD (or at least I tried to). Basically the CD is just a stock FreeBSD installation (base + manpages + kernel) with a small mfsroot between the boot process to let it use unionfs and tmpfs before calling into /sbin/init. You can just run adduser, dhclient and fire up a SSH daemon. It's exactly the same as an installation of FreeBSD on a harddisk, with the only exception that any changes don't survive a reboot. It also has a copy of all the installsets, which means you can do installations and recoveries. I've attached a copy of the script I use to generate the CD. Just make sure you have FreeBSD-9.0-CURRENT-201008-amd64-disc1.iso placed in the same directory as the script and that you have an up-to-date HEAD source tree in /usr/src, with a GENERIC kernel already built. You also need to have cdrtools installed. After that, you should be able to run gencd.sh as root (needed for retaining file permissions), which should generate a FreeBSD-9.0-CURRENT-201008-amd64-ed.iso. Right now it still requires the source tree, because the fixes for tmpfs needed to make it all work aren't in the 201008 snapshot. By the time 201009 is released, the script can easily be modified to use the kernel binaries. I'm sending this email for two different reasons: 1. Be sure to give the CD a try and share your experiences. Does it work? Does it crash? Is it usable for you? If not, why not? 2. Would a CD like this be a good addition to the provided install media? Does it actually solve shortcomings of the existing media? If people think it's a nice CD to work with, I could consider integrating it into release(7). Thanks! -- Ed Schouten <e...@80386.nl> WWW: http://80386.nl/
Hi Ed,could you please upload the resulting ISO so that people who don't want to create it themselves can test your CD?
TIA Lars -- Lars Engels E-Mail: lars.eng...@0x20.net
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