Hi,
First of all, I must say that the process of creating _images_ is not something I worry about too much (I simply don't need disk images all that often) - but being able to create fully configured _packages_ would be something I'd care for a lot (and something I've been thinking about for a long time, I just haven't had any time to do any real coding).
That being said, I see your point - and I hope others will jump in and share their thoughts/ideas as well.
Hans Ulrich Niedermann wrote:
Absolutely. Unfortunately, there hasn't been anybody willing to write that up yet.Composing all relevant information in a chapter of the BU Install Guide will probably the best way to improve this.
I work with CFs a lot, and dd images haven't worked well at all for me on those (I assume due to the different layouts of different CF models - or something like that. I ran into trouble when I tried it the first time, but I didn't investigate any further, mainly since there were other ways to get things to work) - so I usually boot using pxeboot and just set up everything from there, which works extremely well for me (also see "help hdsupp" for step by step instructions on what to do to set up LEAF on a harddrive/CF).2. Bering uClibc releases ship as floppy (FDD) and cdrom (ISO) images, but not as harddisk (HDD) images. But the users of all other devices like HDDs, CF media, USB Sticks, Flash Disks, etc. have to build their images from scratch.
3. Building a FDD image can be easily done by a script. You basically
do
dd if=/dev/zero of=image
mkdosfs image
mcopy *.lrp image:
syslinux image
and you have a working image. You don't even need to be root.
5. Building a HDD image is difficult. You either
a) do it as root on a real HDD device
b) do a lot of evil "dd if= of= bs= count= skip= seek=" magic
with harddisk and partition images to emulate userspace
partition handling.
You have to take into account CHS mappings, whether you want to use
SYSLINUX or GRUB, whether you want multiple BU partitions there
etc.
Good point - and that's usually the reason why there are not more "fine tuned" tools - the guys who are working on the distribution are busy already (and usually, they're comfortable enough setting things up with the existing tools, that it's hard to justify letting other things slide to work on such a tool-set). But if somebody is willing to jump in and work on such a thing (and also document it - something that's often lacking in OpenSource projects), I'm sure there'll be many happy users for such a toolset.IMHO, some of this stuff would be nice to have, but of course someone would have to implement it first :)
Martin
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