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Hi Tomas,

1st: It is working (now)

Transferring the archive to a sd-card the first tests drove me nuts until I realized the fluke:

Your patched syslinux only searches for slax.cfg, extlinux.conf and syslinux.cfg.

In the tar file you are using isolinux.cfg instead. Thus I've extended your patch regarding loadconfig.c to search for isolinux.cfg, too.

Because I'll use the Live Kit for the next FluxFlux release I've extended it furtheron to search in /boot/fluxflux ond for fluxflux.cfg, too.

HINT:

Be prepared that some users probably won't be able to boot Slax from sd-card, because some cardreaders will load the partition which holds the Slax files as eg. /dev/mmcblk0p1 instead of /dev/sdb1.

I will write a mail with further comments and remarks during next weekend.

Good work until now!

Regards, Quax

p.s. Did you use figlet to create the ascii art slax logo in bootinst.bat?

wrong:

...to search in /boot/fluxflux...

right:

...to search in /fluxflux/boot...

Thank you very much for testing. Actually syslinux is not patched at all, since we discovered on syslinux mailing list that it is possible to make it work from any directory without patching. Workaround is described here:
http://www.tomas-m.com/blog/18334-More-SYSLINUX-updates.html

However I can confirm there are TWO bugs in the TAR release, thank you for spotting them. First one is that the bootinst.bat tries to install syslinux to /slax/boot/syslinux which doesn't exist, it's a typo, it should install to /slax/boot/
Second is that (as you mentioned) it won't find isolinux.cfg but only syslinux.cfg.

I'll fix and release new TARs for testing.
Thank you!

I've released new TAR files and updated the links to them in the blog post. Thank you Quax for spotting the bugs.

Regarding the ascii art in bootinst.bat, it was generated here: http://patorjk.com/software/taag/

In virtualbox I need to enable PAE/NX to be able to boot. Is this ok?

Jason, thank you for testing. What does it mean to enable PAE/NX in virtualbox? I'm sorry for my ignorance, I don't use that software.

Physical Address Extension. I think it allows x86 processors to access a physical address greater than 4GB. Sorry that's all the knowledge I have on that :)

In virtualbox there is a setting to select this option the processor settings.

I think this may be a kernel configuration setting.

Hi Tomas,

Quax wrote :
Be prepared that some users probably won't be able to boot Slax from sd-card, because some cardreaders will load the partition which holds the Slax files as eg. /dev/mmcblk0p1 instead of /dev/sdb1.

I'm not sure of that but i believe /dev/mmcblk0p1 is for PCIe SDCard devices. Those kind of devices seem not to be bootable yet ( on my Thinkpad Laptop, no way ...)

@Jason:
is the problem with both 32bit and 64bit versions of the ISO?
Thank you

I have tested the 1b version and it is running in general.

@PAE:

with PAE enabled a system uses 36bit instead 32bit for memory management and thus can use upto 64GB RAM.

Nevertheless it is a show stopper for me if Tomas uses the actual kernel(-config):

With PAE enabled Slax doesn't run on a Pentium-M/Centrino which have a 400MHz FSB; this was verified on my Samsung M40 Notebook.

Imho it would be senseless to to use i486 packages if the kernel needs at least i686. In Addition Slax once gots its reputation mainly from the fact that it runs on older hardware. It would be a shame if this advantage would get lost.

@Slaxee:

Some Acer Aspire One and similar Netbooks have those cardreaders integrated and they are capable of booting from them. Integrating the capability to boot them with Slax, Tomas could advertize kind of "Slax boots them all...".

Quax

Thank you Quax for your test. The 32bit version of Slax will be 486-compatible and will not support PAE. For that reason, the 32bit version will see only max 4GB of RAM (in fact it is somehow less, maybe even 3GB).

The 64bit version of Slax will of course see all available RAM without any limitation.

If a drive (SD card) is seen as /dev/mmcblk0p1, then it shouldn't be any problem as far as I know, as long as it is visible in /proc/partitions. However the syslinux installer script (for Linux) will need to be updated to expect 'p1' suffix for partitions, so it could correctly determine /dev/mmcblk0 as the MBR. At the moment I'm not sure how to do this, though.

Well, the 32 bit tar is not booting for me. It has not found config file.

Thank you Ravise for your feedback.
Did you use the new link for prealpha 1b?
http://ftp.slax.org/Slax-7.x/testing/slax-prealpha-1b-i486.tar

No, sorry, my fault. I used bad command for installing syslinux. It's booting.

Preparing FluxFlux for the new start environment, I have adjusted the ancient bootinst.sh to setup an ext2,3,4 formatted medium, too.

It has been tested with the prealpha-1b after copying lilo and mbr.bin to /slax/boot.

I think you know your scripts, thus I'm only posting the relevant parts.

...

MBR=""

if [[ $EUID -ne 0 ]]; then
echo "This script must be run as root"
exit 1
elif [ ! "$(which syslinux | grep no)" = "" ]; then
echo "syslinux not found or not executable"
exit 1
elif [ ! "$(which extlinux | grep no)" = "" ]; then
echo "extlinux not found or not executable"
exit 1
fi

...

if [ "$MBR" != "$TARGET" ]; then
echo "Setting up MBR on $MBR..."
./slax/boot/lilo -S /dev/null -M $MBR ext
echo "Activating partition $TARGET..."
./slax/boot/lilo -S /dev/null -A $MBR $NUM
echo "Updating MBR on $MBR..."
cat ./slax/boot/mbr.bin > $MBR
fi

echo "Setting up boot record for $TARGET..."

if [ "$(blkid -s TYPE $TARGET | grep ext)" = "" ]; then
syslinux -d /slax/boot $TARGET
else
extlinux --install $MYMNT/slax/boot
fi

...

It would be fine, if you would integrate extlinux booting in your scripts,too.

Quax

Sorry for the late reply. My virtualbox does not support 64 bit. Anyway, we read your other comments regarding this.

Hi Tomas,

another suggestion to decrease zou administrative efforts:

At the moment you are providing Slax both as iso and tar file.

1. By using isohybrid while creting the iso file you would
enable users to write the iso with dd in Linux and with
any image writer in Windows to an usb medium.

2. Nearly every more or less uptodate Linux distribution has
libarchive and thus bsdtar included. As bsdtar (in opposit to
GNU tar) is able to extract iso files I think there is no
need to provide both iso and tar file.
3. You might have a look at http://sourceforge.net/projects/ina/
wchich is a forked project from the GeeXbox installer to install
FluxFlux in Windows NT/2000/XP/7.
I am using bsdtar with this Installer. If you would be interested in,
it could be easily suited to fit Slax's needs.

*your administrative efforts

*which is a forked

Bad luck that you can't edit your posts here ... ;)

*while creating

Thank you for suggesting isohybrid. I've already considered this option. If I understand it right, it only modifies the ISO file so it contains boot record and such, so it boots from USB drive if RAWRITEd to it, but actually it preserves the ISO filesystem on the USB drive (iso9660), thus it will be read-only. It is not any good to run Slax from a readonly USB drive, user will want to write data to it. Or am I wrong? Can you write to such filesystem?

No, you are right, one can't write to it.

It would only be a fast alternative for loop-mounting the iso, extracting it to the usb media and then running bootinst.sh.

I am using this procedure to create an 'unbreakable usb medium' for clients who want to prevent their employees from changing the live environment.

If needed/wanted, I am creating another partition with the remaining space on the medium to be usable with xfs for saving changes.

Beneath others the missing ability to write to the iso9660 partition once was the main reason to create InA for a client.

Tomas,

OK I have an old presario from around 2006 and it has 2GB ram and an AMD 2.2 GHz CPU

Both the 32 & 64 bit ISO's boot fine on virtualbox, but they don't work on Slax V-box.
I got them to work on Puppy Linux V-box and same computer.
I have a bunch of FD's with different Linux distributions,
NimbleX, Dream, Mint, Slax, and lots more.

I get the 4 second boot screen with the 4 boot options.
Works good :-)

Rob

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