Hi
There is also the issue of missing ioctl's for a disk.img

What about bypassing the problem?
We could solve more than one problem at once.
Support for PXE boot/install https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/leaf/ticket/3

I like Martins suggestion below.

What if we create a Leaf application  that can
* be installed by cdrom, PXE-install  on real HW or using qemu, Virtualbox
    for Virtual environment we could use a raw disk.img
    we could connect to existing network. Users would not need a server 
infrastructure.
* act as a PXE-server or install a separate system on local hd/flash/ssd
* Configuration can be saved using a floppy, real or image.

It should be possible to use latest Leaf 3.1 as a base.
When 4.0 is released, we update the application.

/Per

On 2010-11-30 23:16, Martin Hejl wrote:
> Hi dMb,
>
> Am 30.11.2010 22:51, schrieb e-mail dmb.leaf-devel:
>> It *should* work but right now we have a problem with
>> /sbin/fdisk from hdsupp.lrp which I have just confirmed - See
>> http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/leaf/ticket/11 :-(
> Well, if all else fails, you might try booting with Bering uClinc 3.x,
> using the hdsupp that from that distro to set things up, and then copy
> the files for Bering uClinc onto the target drive. I'm not sure if it
> will work, but there's a good chance that syslinux from Bering uClibc
> 3.x will boot 4.0 as well (just as a workaround for the time being,
> until the hdsupp package of 4.x is fixed).
>
>> If I understand correctly what Per is trying to achieve, he also wants
>> to be able to copy (as in "dd") the configured image to a real CF card
>> or similar, so for that we need to crack the problem of what a CF
>> image looks like (I think the issue is disk geometry).
> I'm afraid that approach is likely to fail - varying disk geometries as
> seen by different controllers usually are the biggest issue. I tried
> that approach years ago, and it failed big time (what worked on the CF
> adapter on my devel box, didn't work on my Soekris 4501, what worked on
> my Soekris, didn't work on my PCEngines box, what worked with VMWare
> didn't work with qemu (and so on)). So, as far as I'm concerned, the
> "build it once and dd it to the target medium" approach is difficult at
> best (or maybe I just did something wrong every time I tried).
> That's why I went with the approach of booting via PXE/CDRom, setting up
> the target disk, and copying the files needed.
>
>> Not sure it is possible to fix this in a generic way... Floppy disks
>> are standard, so a floppy disk image is standard, but I get the
>> impression that USB and CF flash drives are much more variable.
>    From my experience, it surely appears to be that way. Maybe the 2.6
> kernel makes a difference, but with Bering uClibc 3.x, I never managed
> to get things to work reliably on different platforms.
>
>> Still,
>> if someone can start with their own real flash drive, partition and
>> format it, then "image' it it should be possible to mess with the
>> image using qemu or similar and copy it back to the physical flash
>> drive later.
> It might be worth a try - to me, after failing several times, the
> approach never seemed promising enough to spend hours of trying, when
> booting via PXE (or from a CD image) and setting things up directly on
> the target platform was a matter of 15 to 30 minutes. If I'd had to
> deploy tens or hundreds of boxes, I would have spent more time on that
> issue, but since it always was about only 2 or 3 boxes for me, my
> approach seemed to be more sensible, for the amount of time I was
> willing to spend.
>
> I'm not saying it can't be done - I just never managed to get that
> approach to work reliably. Maybe I simply overlooked something, and it
> actually works if done correctly.
>
> Martin
>


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