[ILUG] Bootable business card CD-Rs

[Dave O Connor]

Someone called Niall O Broin said on Fri, Jun 09, 2000 at 03:24:23AM +0100:
> Customised ISO image
> 
> This is definitely a bigger issue than any of us first thought (OK, admit
> it, nobody really thought) and I don't think it'll be resolved by the AGM.
> We'll burn whatever number people want of the standard download from
> Linuxcare, and will continue to investigate the customisation. I had a look
> on Linuxcare and there is a 120MB source tgz there, so that might be a place
> to start. Maybe someone with a reasonable pipe could slurp that, and perhaps
> we could get a few CDs burnt for the differently connected (is that PC
> enough) who are interested in the customisation project.
> 
Quote from the "Errata" section of the site:



		 Here is a replacement for extract_compressed_fs
contained on the BBC. The issue is the extract_compressed_fs expected
the first network ordered word it found at the
block offset to be the size of the block,
unfortunately, the block struct is reversed, the size comes after
the data.  The patch does it the same way cloop.c does, using
 offset[b+1] - offset[b].

		 This replacement is only needed if you
intend to
extract the "singularity" file that contains the filesystem found
on the booted CD, without booting the CD. Booting the CD
	itself is a much more functional way to
	 get to the
files. rsync, contained on the BBC, can easily be used to copy the
files to another machine on a network. We can not
	 guarantee that this replacement
	extract_compressed_fs
will work outside of a Debian system using the same kernel and libraries as
found on the BBC. 

</QUOTE>

So, we've got a way of obtaining the contents of the singularity, obviously
cosmetic changes can be made to the filesystem once we have a copy. However,
I'm not sure how one would recreate a new singularity. Perhaps it's quite
simple. I hope so, it'd make simple cosmetic hacks to it trivial :)

	- DoC