grant centauri said :
> Hi all,
>
> I should probably do this over at launchpad, but i'm still unfamiliar with
> that whole process. Beginning to understand though.
>
> I just grabbed the broth source with bzr, successfully built an image and
> then decided to try and use the chroot/usr/sbin/make-live-device.sh script
> to make a live USB. Perhaps some of my issues are from not doing it in a
> puredyne environment, but I thought it should work.
>
> A number of issues which I would be willing to help fix, if pointed in the
> right direction:
>
> 1. i did not have parted on my build environment. the script still did
> something, it would probably be good to check for that and stop the script
> first.
Yes, the script should check that all the necessary tools are installed
before running. Just testing for file existence should be enough, but
... see below.
> 2. the grub install was a bit weird. i ended up with a grub.cfg file that
> was blank, and even when filling it in with the information in /extra/grub2
> I popped up into a grub shell rather than a boot environment. I ended up
> manually installing grub to the first partition.
>
> 3. the grub.cfg included is not right. there's already a bug report on
> this. I had to change the vmlinuz1 and initrd1.img and the set root to
> {hd0,1}, i also had to remove the search --no-floppy line... there's
> probably a better fix for that.
Overall, it's a bit tricky to focus on these issues as they are linked
to other more important development that need to be investigated first
so we do not waste time fixing bugs that might become irrelevant.
I contributed the original shell script to work with syslinux, and AFAIC
remember then karsten ported it to work with GRUB, then Enrike started
to work on a Python version that would work both as CLI + GUI.
Other dev contributes bits and bytes at every step of course. It's all
in the bzr repos.
Now, I am not sure what is the state of the different directions, but I
have the impression that they are all incomplete. The ideal steps now
would be:
1. Figure out once and for all if Puredyne can boot via USB on a mactel.
There has been lots of very interesting progress on this reported on
the bug tracker and last year during an Helsinki sprint, I managed to
get quite close (also explained in the bug report). But I don't own a
Mac, so I could not do anything after the sprint.
2. If 1. is successful then we need to test if the mactel key can still
boot on a regular PC as well, or what kind of tricks might be possible
to have a unique boot system for both mac and pc.
3. Write the software that can generate the right partition table,
bootloader and whatnot for the universal key, or provide an option to
generate either a mac one or a regular pc key. The final software should
preferably be merged with Enrike's code so we can provide a nice CLI +
GUI app.
Prior to that, it is important to check the status of unetbootin to
avoid duplicate work, I do not know for example if all the steps
required above could be done within their framework, and if that's the
case it would be better to drop our script and contribute to their
software with a Puredyne specific profile or something like that.
> I am willing to do the work but probably need some hints as to where to
> begin.
What do you think of the steps above?
I can give you access to the code repos (writing access) if you want to
start hacking.
a.
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