Re: [Morphix-devel] Feature request

[Alex de L. <al...@de...>]

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Back from the hills!

Paul wrote:
> A few (minor) changes have been made to the miniroot scripts, so we
> will need some new udebs built - In testing, I notice linuxrc calls
> on awk which duly fails... Need a busybox.udeb with awk built in.

Ahh, so this was the real problem with copy-to-ram. Should have looked
into it more closely, I'll get an updated busybox (with source) in the
repository for tomorrow's build.

> There may well be other issues needing to be resolved - The inclusion
> of assorted SATA/PATA drivers needs to be looked at. Should the h/w
> specific drivers go in the miniroot, or can we get away with just
> libata ?

Technically we'd only need the CD/DVD drivers in the miniroot. If you
have a SATA DVD drive, I've packaged the changes you made to mkminiroot
last week. If you update on Zathras you can try them out.

> On the "random notes" front, I had a poke around isolinux (messing
> with d-i), and wondered if it might be worthwhile running the
> base.mod as a compressed archive booted with isolinux - If udebs
> were used (ala d-i) it may well be possible to generate a base
> ISO in under 10Megs.

It used to be the case that we'd have to do quite a bit of voodoo in the
base module in order to get the main module configured and purring
along. This required quite a few dependencies, and a base that was too
big to push into RAM.

Between xorg autodetection, hal and udev there isn't a lot left nowadays
for hwsetup to do (aside generous amounts of RAM in even the cheapest
laptops). Stripping the base and putting it into the initrd is then the
logical step, what we would be left with would be comparable to
d-i/debian-live/casper (we could also simply use the debian-live scripts
and bolt on support for morphix main/mini modules, which would have my
preference).

Such a step would be quite a break from the past, but it's been a long
time coming. Hell, any excuse to drop cloop along the way is fine by me.
There are a few technical open questions (location of lkm's, mainmod
init scripts etc) but it should bring about a much simpler morphix that
requires a lot less babysitting.

The main question is if such a switch is worthwhile compared to
switching to debian-live outright.

cheers,

Alex
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