[ILUG] Hacking the BBC Hmmm.... Was Bootable Business Cards - CD-Rs are ordered

[John Malone - Sun Microsystems Ireland - Test Engineer]

* At 10:57, Conor Daly wrote:
> Just been looking at the BBC image.  Doesn't look too hackable :-(
> 
> It consists of a 26Mb "Rusty's compressed ext2 filesystem" called
> "singularity" and a few other bits and pieces.  The singularity consists of
> a #!/bin/sh , a command and 26Mb of binary data.
> 
> When I booted it, There was only one init file I could find in /sbin.defunct
> which runs the boot sequence.  I've inserted some relevant lines at the end
> of this.
> 
> Anyone else wann burn the iso to a standard CD and have a look.  I'm not
> experienced enough with this sort of thing to tell quite what we could do
> with it.

Can you mount an iso in linux? 

I know you can in solaris (lofiadm I think).

> 
> ##############
> I'd be inclined to suggest we shouldn't burn a bunch of these immediately
> but rather get a copy each to use as a learning tool for writing our own.
> ##############
> 
> On the up side, the image contains X (fvwm), wvdial, loads of networking,
> ssh (AFAIK, telnet etc are linked to run in ssh by default) and a cute
> little easter egg (do a "SVGATextMode" and then "egg" in a shell).
Does it have the imm.o kernel module? Would be cool as then you could
mount your 250MB zip drive from it. Assuming parport* stuff was there.

> 
> Couldn't get X to run properly at home.  Hacked the XF86Config to match my
> local one and got X up but the windows all have transparent backgrounds and
> don't refresh properly (It was late and I was supposed to be doing something
> else!).
> 
> ---
> Conor Daly
> -------------------------------------
> General Forecast Division
> Met Eireann
> Glasnevin Hill
> Dublin 9.
> 
> ph +353 1 8064255
> fax +353 1 8064275
> 
> conor.daly at met.ie
> 
> Here's the bit that uncompresses the main filesystem
> 
>       # Normal LNX rescue system code
> 
>       echo "Found the LNX CD-ROM on $drive, mounting under /mnt/cdrom-real"
>       umount /mnt/tmp
>       mount -r -t iso9660 $drive /mnt/cdrom-real 2>/dev/null
> 
>       # cloop mount happens here!
> 
>       if [ -f /mnt/cdrom-real/singularity ]
>       then
>         echo "Found compressed ext2 filesystem in /mnt/cdrom-real, loading
> cloop driver"
>  cd /mnt/cdrom-real
> 
>  # uses Rusty's compressed loopback block device driver, cloop.c
> 
>  # This associates the decompressed contents of the file "singularity"
>  # with the block device /dev/cloop (block device 240, 0 for now)
> 
>  # Heaven forbid we should do something so difficult as
> 
>  #      /mnt/cdrom-real/insmod /mnt/cdrom-real/cloop.o <
> /mnt/cdrom-real/singularity
>         #      mount -r -t ext2 /dev/cloop /mnt/cdrom
> 
>  # instead, we just _RUN_ the thing!
> 
>         echo "Mounting compressed blockdevice /dev/cloop under /mnt/cdrom"
>  ./singularity /mnt/cdrom
> 
>       else
>         echo "Uh-oh, can't find compressed ext2 filesystem!"
>       fi
> 
>      # cloop mount done
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
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