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#1 2006-10-08 11:48:14

gradgrind
Member
From: Germany
Registered: 2005-10-06
Posts: 921

larch-2

I think the new version of the larch live Archlinux CD/USB-stick building kit, with many new features, should be ready for a bit of testing, if anyone is interested.

For download links see the website ...

Among the new features are
  uses 'mkinitcpio'
        build profiles (named configuration directories)
        can use GRUB or isolinux/syslinux as bootloader
        'do-it-all' master script: 'mklarch'
        new hard disk installer: 'larchin'
        save session back to boot medium


And I've put a substitute squashfs package for 2.6.18 in there, because of segfault problems with the one in the repos.

Share and Enjoy!

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#2 2006-10-08 11:59:04

iphitus
Forum Fellow
From: Melbourne, Australia
Registered: 2004-10-09
Posts: 4,927

Re: larch-2

could you please post all the PKGBUILDs you built the packages with? In particular squashfs, because phrakture was looking for a fix for that, although im not sure if he found it -- so i'd be interested to see how you fixed it.

James

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#3 2006-10-08 11:59:49

tomk
Forum Fellow
From: Ireland
Registered: 2004-07-21
Posts: 9,839

Re: larch-2

gradgrind wrote:

And I've put a substitute squashfs package for 2.6.18 in there, because of segfault problems with the one in the repos.

How did you fix it? Adding the details to the bug report would be helpful.

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#4 2006-10-08 12:12:56

gradgrind
Member
From: Germany
Registered: 2005-10-06
Posts: 921

Re: larch-2

Sorry chaps, I didn't fix it, I'm not that clever! I cheated by compiling it 'in-kernel' and then making a package out of the module ...

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#5 2006-10-08 12:57:13

Sigi
Member
From: Thurgau, Switzerland
Registered: 2005-09-22
Posts: 1,131

Re: larch-2

larch2 - cool  8)

I'll give it a try!


Haven't been here in a while. Still rocking Arch. smile

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#6 2006-10-08 13:09:07

dtw
Forum Fellow
From: UK
Registered: 2004-08-03
Posts: 4,439
Website

Re: larch-2

Dude, for goodness sake, pay for some reliable hosting or at least open a project at one of the numerous project hosting sites - 404s hardly lend credibility to a project.

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#7 2006-10-08 13:39:09

gradgrind
Member
From: Germany
Registered: 2005-10-06
Posts: 921

Re: larch-2

dtw wrote:

Dude, for goodness sake, pay for some reliable hosting or at least open a project at one of the numerous project hosting sites - 404s hardly lend credibility to a project.

You are of course right, in principle, it's just a question of where you put your time and money. The advantage of the approach I have taken so far, is that it is completely free and extremely quick and simple - no registration, bills, simple file transfers, no need to learn cvs, svn or whatever.

But if anyone has a good suggestion, let me know.

By the way, what was 404-ing? I haven't noticed anything here.

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#8 2006-10-08 14:09:46

Sigi
Member
From: Thurgau, Switzerland
Registered: 2005-09-22
Posts: 1,131

Re: larch-2

Seems like I'd have to put a little more effort in converting my liveCD to larch2 than I thought. I didn't expect that much changes. I really like the new profiles feature, and grub on an Arch liveCD also sounds promissing.
I'll report back as soon as I built my first larch2-LiveCD - no time atm. (I have to smoke shisha/H2O-Pipe with some friends now ;-) )

Keep up the good work gradgrind!

edit: cosmetic changes


Haven't been here in a while. Still rocking Arch. smile

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#9 2006-10-09 07:28:27

shadowhand
Member
From: MN, USA
Registered: 2004-02-19
Posts: 1,142
Website

Re: larch-2

dtw wrote:

Dude, for goodness sake, pay for some reliable hosting or at least open a project at one of the numerous project hosting sites - 404s hardly lend credibility to a project.

Mirrored here: http://people.os-zen.net/shadowhand/dow … 008.tar.gz


·¬»· i am shadowhand, powered by webfaction

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#10 2006-10-09 08:17:28

Sigi
Member
From: Thurgau, Switzerland
Registered: 2005-09-22
Posts: 1,131

Re: larch-2

The new documentation could also be mirrored somewhere...


Haven't been here in a while. Still rocking Arch. smile

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#11 2006-10-10 12:36:35

gradgrind
Member
From: Germany
Registered: 2005-10-06
Posts: 921

Re: larch-2

A few fixes and a bit of extra documentation.

The 'default' profile (with KDE) should work now.

New download: http://ultrashare.net/hosting/fl/b666064a50/

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#12 2006-10-14 08:30:19

gradgrind
Member
From: Germany
Registered: 2005-10-06
Posts: 921

Re: larch-2

New version (20061014). The hard disk installer should now more or less work as intended ...

See download links on website.

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#13 2006-10-20 23:07:34

jnengland77
Member
From: Black Hills, USA
Registered: 2005-05-06
Posts: 111

Re: larch-2

smile This project is pretty cool, I successfully made a livecd with it.  However, I did have some issues the first time I tried it was having a hard time finding it's own packages and so I had to remove them from the addedpacks file, and reran it through, and it created the repo itself.  Then I had to put that into my pacman.conf.  Got it to work after that; although, I missed up and forgot to include some .configure for some programs(my custom conky and nitrogen), and gaim failed to function correctly, not sure why(I think cause no default config).  Anyway great job thus far...

I can only think of one suggestion right now.
~ Use something to generate Xorg.conf (maybe how Archie does it?)

~jnengland77
P.S. sad I only have 4 cd-r left and so I'll just work on configuring it correctly, and figuring out how to use the archie script(I have a copy somewhere... Why don't I label CDs!)

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#14 2006-10-21 04:47:23

gradgrind
Member
From: Germany
Registered: 2005-10-06
Posts: 921

Re: larch-2

The location of the 'custompacks' directory (containing the larch packages and whatever else you want to include) must be correctly set in 'pacin_conf' in the selected profile. If you just unpack the tar-ball and use the existing (default) 'custompacks' directory with one of the supplied profiles this should be the case. If you put a profile directory somewhere else, or use a different location for the packages, you will need to change 'CUSTOMPACKS' (in pacin_conf).

It would of course be helpful to have a script to generate xorg.conf, but my personal experience with these is not that convincing - I have often found a general vesa config to work better. I have yet to find an automatic xorg configuration which didn't need some manual adjustment. I tend to use xorg's own utilities.

But you can of course use 'hwd' (which is essentially what Archie uses). It's a bit old now and rather limited, but it might help. In my larch-1 tar-ball there is a 'hwd' package which - together with the 'lshwd' package in the same tar-ball - has one or two bugs fixed.

You can get the actual Archie scripts from Archie cvs (in the archie-scripts/etc/archie directory) - mkxcfg and (for nvidia) autogfx.

gaim needs recompiling for use in larch (it is a problem which arises when using unionfs). The '--disable-binreloc' option is needed. I have posted a feature request to have this done in the standard package.

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#15 2006-10-21 15:04:33

lolo
Member
Registered: 2006-07-13
Posts: 12

Re: larch-2

Hello,

Thanks for your cool livecd creation system. I have swiftly set up a profile based on your two minis.

After my first attempt, the livecd failed and led to a kernel panic. By looking at your scripts more closely, I have noticed some references to '/opt/larch' (though, I guess, '/' is this case is supposed to be somewhat relative). Still, I link my own larch directory to my system absolute /opt path (no other change). This time the second livecd booted well.  Strange, isn't it ?

One question : I would like to take benefit of the USELVM="yes" option in rc.conf, and add lvm2 support and volume detection when booting. Which mkinitcpio.conf should I change ? The one inside the larch_initcpio-1.9.0003-10.pkg.tar.gz custompack, or the one inside ArchImage/etc ?

Thanks for all.

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#16 2006-10-21 19:54:49

jnengland77
Member
From: Black Hills, USA
Registered: 2005-05-06
Posts: 111

Re: larch-2

Thanks for the reply gradgrind, I'll look into using the larch1 hwd package, and figuring out how to get it to work.  And I'll make a custom gaim package to get it to work.

As for the custompackages thing I had the absolute path to them and it still didn't work correctly, anyway I got it to work so.

~jnengland77

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#17 2006-10-22 09:09:04

gradgrind
Member
From: Germany
Registered: 2005-10-06
Posts: 921

Re: larch-2

lolo wrote:

After my first attempt, the livecd failed and led to a kernel panic. By looking at your scripts more closely, I have noticed some references to '/opt/larch' (though, I guess, '/' is this case is supposed to be somewhat relative). Still, I link my own larch directory to my system absolute /opt path (no other change). This time the second livecd booted well.  Strange, isn't it ?

Yes, this is very strange - things like that shouldn't happen. No linking should be necessary, so I would be grateful if you could supply more details of the problem.

lolo wrote:

One question : I would like to take benefit of the USELVM="yes" option in rc.conf, and add lvm2 support and volume detection when booting. Which mkinitcpio.conf should I change ? The one inside the larch_initcpio-1.9.0003-10.pkg.tar.gz custompack, or the one inside ArchImage/etc ?

I knew that would come up sometime. The problem is that I don't use LVM myself, so I have rather ignored it until now. I even cut the relevant bit out of rc.sysinit, so that it couldn't cause problems (except for people with LVM volumes of course ...).

Anyway, I've had a bit of a read and I think I know roughly what needs changing. You don't need to touch the initcpio, as the live CD system itself doesn't need the LVM stuff. But /etc/rc.sysinit needs to get its LVM code back, plus a 'modprobe dm-mod'. The main difficulty is the automatic generation of /etc/fstab - I'll have a go at it, but you'll need to give me a little time.

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#18 2006-10-22 09:16:24

gradgrind
Member
From: Germany
Registered: 2005-10-06
Posts: 921

Re: larch-2

jnengland77 wrote:

As for the custompackages thing I had the absolute path to them and it still didn't work correctly, anyway I got it to work so.

Maybe it is a problem with your /etc/pacman.conf, if you have changed this around. My script does a rather (too) primitive search for the beginning of the repo list by looking for '#[testing]' or '[testing]' at the beginning of a line. So in order for the script to work properly your pacman.conf should look like this:

 ...
# REPOSITORIES
#   - can be defined here or included from another file
#   - pacman will search repositories in the order defined here.
#   - local/custom mirrors can be added here or in separate files
#

#[testing]
...

If it doesn't, please try adding that '#[testing]' line (until I come up with a better script).

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#19 2006-10-22 15:36:18

gradgrind
Member
From: Germany
Registered: 2005-10-06
Posts: 921

Re: larch-2

OK, LVM support is ready for testing.

The 'mini' (not 'mini_de') profile can act as an example (you need 'dm-mod' in MODULES, and USELVM="yes"). The volumes should then appear in /etc/fstab automatically. Please let me know if there are problems.

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#20 2006-10-22 18:04:10

lolo
Member
Registered: 2006-07-13
Posts: 12

Re: larch-2

Ok, I have removed the link to my larch base directory and make a new build. Well, no more panic. I guess this came from something else I changed without paying attention on it. Sorry !

Yesterday, I have modified larch_initcpio-1.9.0003-10.pkg so that to include lvm support in it. Works but not as clean as with a "native" Arch installation (especially, no /dev/vg/Arch available but instead /dev/mapper/vg-Arch). A bit annoying, but still useful for a rescue CD ;-). Automatic registration in /etc/fstab is something that was far beyond my deepest dreams !

A little modest tip : while reading your documentation, I notice that you personnally prefer not to use UTF8 because of mc. I personnally have included mc-utf8 from community in my mini-cd. Works great with gpm.

I will try the new larch2 version. Thanks a lot for your responsiveness.

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#21 2006-10-22 18:33:36

lolo
Member
Registered: 2006-07-13
Posts: 12

Re: larch-2

Excellent, gradgring !

Lvm2 and /etc/fstab autofilling works like a charm.

Keep up the good work !

The only thing I can say is : thanks, thanks, thanks.

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#22 2006-10-22 20:17:47

The_Nerd
Member
From: Syracuse, NY / Baltimore, MD
Registered: 2005-11-30
Posts: 134
Website

Re: larch-2

Excellent utility Gradgrind!

I've been using it to create some wonderful Live CD's for my own personal use, but as a note of interest I've begun to work some basic video card selection support into my profile.

The Gparted live cd has a very simple, yet very effective shell script that asks you what kind of video card you have, and then writes the proper xorg.conf driver seciton once you have selected. I've extracted those scripts and moved them into my profile allowing me to select color depth, resolution, and video driver, before starting X.

If anyone would like more information, let me know, i'll start a thread about how to add it into your larch2 profile.

Thanks again for the excellent utility which has allowed us to make our very own live cd's Gradgrind!

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#23 2006-10-22 23:34:15

Sigi
Member
From: Thurgau, Switzerland
Registered: 2005-09-22
Posts: 1,131

Re: larch-2

The_Nerd wrote:

If anyone would like more information, let me know, i'll start a thread about how to add it into your larch2 profile.

I'm interested in a tool that automates the xorg.conf part on boot. I read somewhere that hwd doesn't a very good job in this issue - is there a better way to achieve this? Has dtw already finished his work on the script for archie that does this?


Haven't been here in a while. Still rocking Arch. smile

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#24 2006-10-23 01:42:22

jnengland77
Member
From: Black Hills, USA
Registered: 2005-05-06
Posts: 111

Re: larch-2

I also want this information.

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#25 2006-10-23 03:41:03

The_Nerd
Member
From: Syracuse, NY / Baltimore, MD
Registered: 2005-11-30
Posts: 134
Website

Re: larch-2

I haven't figured out full automation quite yet. Nor have I looked at the Archie scripts.

The Gparted live cd pulls information from somewhere and then matches it in this script which then echo's out the config to xorg.conf. This is in refrence to the autodetection which they have in place currently, which is also, far from perfect and still beyond my full understanding, so I have not tried to use that yet.

What I have used is this. They have a nice menu which pops up before hand which lets you select the video card manually if you so desire. I have taken the manual video card selection script and added it to run before startx. This allows me to choose i810 if I know I'm on an intel machine, nv if I'm on an nvidia machine, etc, but it still requires my prior knowledge of the hardware.

I hope to either work in autodetection with a fallback to manual, as is in the Gparted script, or perhaps show the lspci output when desired and the video card is not known beforehand.

I've only run the cd with video card selection once, since schoolwork has taken precedence this weekend. I should have time tomorrow mid-afternoon to give it a few more test runs, and then I'll post a profile for everyone to try out.

That's the wonderful thing about the new larch scripts, this can all be implemented within the profile, and therefore would require no major modifications to larch!

Just gotta love that
big_smile

Edit: I guess I lied about the seperate thread, I figured this was part of the larch2 discussion, so I left it here. Discussion isnt off topic enough for a split smile

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