> Hi, > > I was wondering if Mandrake has any tools which could help creating > bootable Mandrake CD out of your installed system on a hard drive?
Please take a look at http://minicd.berlios.de, and if you have the bandwidth, try the ISO available, it's quite good. > > I thought it would be quite useful because of at least four reasons: > > 1) impress your friends with Mandrake, handing them working Mandrake > system on a CD, > > 2) be able to create working, hard-disk-error proof server system (i.e. > as an internet gateway with lots of add-ons; floppies are just too > small), > > 3) create a rescue system on a CD, > > 4) MOST importantly: it could be a great advantage over other distros. > There are distros that just are working out of a CD, with Knoppix > certainly most popular amongst them, but also SuSE has such a live CD in > its offer. > > What do you think? Indeed, they are all good reasons, and the reason why a number of others on this list are working on aspects of implementing this. Jaco Greef (from minicd) is currently updating his work. Thomas Backlund introduced cloop in his kernel and patches, and so cloop is now in the Mandrake 2.4.22.7mdk kernel. If you (and any others lurking ...) are interested, have time to work on this in the next few days, please send me a mail in private, and I will add you to the current CC list I use when I get relevant mails. Hopefully we will get a mailing list up and running if we have any significant amount of mail in the future. BTW, the current idea is to: 1)Figure out how to bootstrap Drakx in a chroot (be it a loopback mounted filesystem or seperate partition) to the point where we can either run urpmi, or even better, run an installation with the choice of packages etc (Tibor said he would try and look at this) 2)If we can bootstrap DrakX with full installation available (this may only be possible via non-removable-media installations due to issues with chroot'ing and changing mounted media on --bind-mounted filesystems), then we can run an autoconfiguration. Thus, we would be able to provide the majority of a customised livecd in a small single file, which anyone would be able to generate with the existing tools. Some tasks may remain after installation, but it may be possible to abuse drakx for those which are not common across all minicd implementations. Jaco estimated that he should have something to show by the end of the weekend, he has two packages which need to go in, which I will try and get into contrib as soon as I get them from him (or make them myself, one is quite trivial). Regards, Buchan ***************************************************************** Please click on http://www.cae.co.za/disclaimer.htm to read our e-mail disclaimer or send an e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] for a copy. *****************************************************************
