[Gbootroot-devel] Re: gboot-root

[Jonathan R. <mtt...@ac...>]

On Thu, 28 Sep 2000 pu...@ly... wrote:

> 
> I think it would be nice if gbootroot could make a bootable cdrom with a
> whole linux system. (just mount /tmp and /var or what's needed as a
> ramdisk)

Hi Magnus,

I remember you from bootroot.  I don't have a cdrw right now to test
something like this out, but getting a cdrw is a definite TODO .. but
that's what I told the project leader several months ago on another
project I was involved with.  gBootRoot is being developed on
www.sourceforge.net/projects/gbootroot, so if you get an account at
sourceforge and send me your login, I can register you as a tester, I'd
really appreciate having a tester for this project. 

Here some plans I have for gBootRoot, once the Olympics are over, and I
use my free time in a different way. :)
  
There will be a new section to help in creating Linux systems.  It will
incorporate code from Yard to make accessing configuration options in Yard
much easier.  This will allow people to make customized Linux systems from
stuff laying around in their hard drives.  I have plans which go beyond
this, but that is in the future. 

The new section will allow a different root device to be specifed then the
one being used by the boot device.  But things can get really creative
here.  Maybe somebody wants to use one of those new boot loaders, or maybe
they want to create a bootable cdrom in the traditional way.  There will
be methods added to allow this to happen.  When the method is choosen
gBootRoot will change its appearance to take the parameters of that method
into consideration.

One method which really interests me is the ability to test a live Linux
system by running another kernel as a process over your normal kernel. The
ability to do this already exists in user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net, but
it's still experimental, but very cool, I've tried it.  So a person could
create a whole Linux system in a file, and test it with UML.  Afterwards,
they could choose another method to setup the system on whatever media
they want to.

I am looking forward to having you test out your ideas as they are added
to gBootRoot.  I really appreciated your help on bootroot.  

Best regards,


Jonathan