[Morphix-devel] How about creating a TeX Live CD module?

[Zhang Le <ej...@16...>]

Hello, 
    Does anyone has interest in creating a full latex minimod from TeX Live
    CD?  Anyone who place such mod in his morphix cd will have instant
    access to the most comprehensive latex system: TeX Live CD
    collection.

    The original TeX Live CD has more than 650M TeX related software.
    After striping win32 stuff and compressing it with create_compressed_fs
    I get a 260M compressed image. I need to mount the image somewhere
    in the morphix tree and add bin/i386-linux to the PATH envrionment.

    My first attempt is to create a minimod like mini-console.mod and
    use the same mod loading script:
    cp -s deb/* /var/tmp/trans

    But that does not work as I expect: copy thousands of files from the 260M image
    is too slow and I end up with and "out of space" error.

    Since the "live" nature of the TeX Live CD makes it relative free to
    choose install location. My next attempt is to place the image
    in /iso dir on the CD and place a setup script in /exec which will be called by mini-exec.mod on loading.
    the setup script just insmod cloop-mini4 file=iso/tex.mod and mount
    the /dev/cloop-mini4 on /mnt/cdrom/tex

    Now I face another problem: I need to append /mnt/cdrom/tex/bin/i386-linux to PATH environment.
    Since the setup script is called in the sub shell of mini-exec.mod,
    I can not change the parent shell's PATH.

    Is there a way to change PATH from a minimod? I do not want to
    unpack/pack a main mod only to change a PATH environment.

    A dirty hack may be modify /tmp/init.sh created by Mainmod and
    adjust PATH there. But I think this is a *dirty* hack. Is there a
    better way?
-- 
                                     Sincerely yours,
                                            Zhang Le