Tiny Core Base > TCB Q&A Forum

/opt/tce - how does it work?

(1/2) > >>

bmarkus:
How to use /opt/tce for remastering with 2.11? Using the same structure as /tce with onboot.lst and optional directory it works when /opt/tce is added to intrd but doesn't recognized on the boot media, e.g. on the CD.

Is it the expected behavior?

curaga:
Do you mean opt/tce on the cd root? That's never worked, or supposed to.

Yes, what you see is expected behavior.

bmarkus:

--- Quote from: curaga on May 08, 2010, 06:29:14 AM ---Do you mean opt/tce on the cd root? That's never worked, or supposed to.

Yes, what you see is expected behavior.

--- End quote ---

It's bad  :(

I have an USB stick with TC 2.11 installed; there is a /tce dir with cca. 100M extensions (LXDE, FileZilla, Firefox, WICD, etc.) What happens during boot?

- TC is loaded (less than 10M) and starts
- extensions in /tce mounted
- saved data (few megs) loaded from /tce

This is really fast and there is the option to control mounting or loading to RAM extensions via the config files. This works great.

If I want to create a remastered TC which has these extensions built-in, the only way is to put them to /opt/tce in the initrd file. Resulted initrd is 10x larger now and it has to be fully loaded before anything can be done. Result is a really slow boot, system takes nearly 10 times compared to the same non-remastered system. Practically it is useless.

Desired way of operation would be to look for /opt/tce or any other directory with special signature on a similar way as /tce is found and process this directory as /tce. Much better just to check it on the partition used for booting. With this, remastered version would boot as fast as non-remastered with the benefit of easy remastering.

bmarkus:
BTW, in SLAX there is a directory where you can drop modules (extensions) which will be added to the system during boot. Its all module concept is less capable and and less matured compared to TC, but it works.

Also, in SLAX you have the information whatw as the boot media and you can use it later at user level to access it.

maro:
I'm with bmarkus here that it would be nice to have a "special" directory on the ISO which could hold the extensions and behave similar to a hard disk or USB drive. There are a few issues I can anticipate with this:
* Using a boot CD-ROM the same way as a hard disk or USB drive would require for the CD-ROM to be permanently mounted on the system. That is not how TC/MC operates right now and might not be acceptable for the majority of users. One way around it might be to copy the whole "stuff" (e.g. '.../tce/optional/*', '.../tce/*.lst', '.../tce/*.flg') from the CD-ROM to '/tmp' and proceed from there.
* Another problem might be the possible "clash" between extensions (and their respective "treatment" controlled by '*.lst' and '*.flg' files) that are on the CD-ROM vs. the ones on hard disk or USB drive. Ideally it should not be a one or the other approach but maybe process the CD-ROM extensions first and then continue as now with the detection and processing of extensions from a hard disk or USB drive.I'm not sure if the approach of copying files off the CD-ROM to '/tmp' is faster than extracting a (large) cpio-archive, but at least it might allow for a kind of "ondemand" treatment.

Note: I have not really done any research in the forum to which degree this has been discussed earlier, I just could not resist to put in my 2cents ...

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page