remastering dCore ?

[bernhard]

I would like to remaster dCore for being able to use my german Keyboard and/or having the ISO on an usb stick, but I am failing miserably, when I try to follow my own instructions created some time ago for CorePlus (see wiki: http://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/wiki:remastering_kmap_iso). ezremaster complains about a wrong ISO.

Any help appreciated.

--
  Bernhard

[Jason W]

Posting ISO images of dCore I have yet to do, and this reminds me I need to get it going.  I will do that now.

I have not used ezremaster in a long time, I personally have been playing with Unetbootin to make bootable usb's so I can't really help troubleshoot ezremaster at this point.   I will put up some ISOs and we can go from there.

[Misalf]

As an alternative to EZremaster, if there is no need to add or change files that are specifically related to Tiny Core (i.e. just editing boot loader config), ISO Master (isomaster.tcz) has been a quick and easy solution for me.

[Jason W]

I am using an ISO of dCore that has been put to a bootable usb via unetbootin.  I have one 100mb fat32 partition that unetbootin places the boot files, and about 7.9 gigs of ext4 space for the tce directory and data.  Before, dCore was basically to use the grub boot loader of an existing Linux install.  Being able to install it on a bootable usb along with a data partition makes it much more nomadic.  And once installed to usb, the syslinux.cfg file is editable so the boot parameters can be changed without having to further remaster.

I will create the ISO creating routine for the x86 dCore ports tomorrow and upload them.

Just make sure to use the "importsce -r " option when using a usb partition as the tce directory to prolong the life of the usb drive.

EDIT: Just saw Misalf's post while posting this one.  That is another option also.

[Misalf]

I usually use the first partition (so Windows can see it) of my bootable USB drive for regular data storage (FAT) without any sensitive OS data on it.
The second one contains boot loader files and several .ISOs (+ f.e. persistant TC data) for booting via grub2. I love that Core is using the most reasonable boot code for that: "iso=...".
You'll take care of that, right? (:

[bernhard]

my current problem is: I have a bootable usb stick (with legacy grub, its menu.lst, and memdisk) where I can put yet another ISO, but I have to modify the boot command line with iso=... and kmap=... to get my german keyboard usable with the usb stick. The kmap=... requires kmaps.tcz to be installed, so I would like to have some "embedded" extension similar to what CorePlus.iso uses (I think it uses cde as default for the extension directory).

Just aside: iso=...  was added due to one of my first discussions about two years ago ... see http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,12724.0.html

--
  Bernhard

[Jason W]

I have looked into it, CDE is already supported and I just need to copy into dCore the /usr/bin/fromISOfile script.  That and put up some iso's.

The name of the source and Debian/Ubuntu package for kmaps is console-data.  And the directory to create on the iso and place an imported console-data.sce is /cde/sce/.  I will start working this in.

[bernhard]

...

I will start working this in.

phantastic, very welcome ...

[bernhard]

The name of the source and Debian/Ubuntu package for kmaps is console-data.  And the directory to create on the iso and place an imported console-data.sce is /cde/sce/.  I will start working this in.

hmm, as time goes by ... yes I needed quite some time to try it out ...

In the meantime I have a bare dCore running and succeeded in importing console-data and loadsce'ing it. But as far as I can see console-data installs only gz-compressed ascii kmap files but not the binary versions required by loadkmap.

So, a little bit of googling later I fetched yet another package: kbd which requires other packages also and installs the required command loadkeys.

The required steps for getting a keyboard-layout different from english (with german and no dead keys as an example are):


importsce console-data
loadsce console-data
importsce kbd
loadsce kbd
gunzip -c /usr/share/keymaps/i386/qwertz/de-latin1-nodeadkeys.kmap.gz > de-latin1-ndk.kmap
gunzip -c /usr/share/keymaps/i386/qwertz/de-latin1.kmap.gz > de-latin1.kmap
loadkeys -b de-latin1-ndk.kmap > de.kmap.bin
sudo loadkmap < de.kmap.bin


importsce kbd ask you to choose between kbd and kbdd. I have chosen kbd and apparently found the correct package. de-latin1-ndk.kmap includes de-latin1.kmap, but loadkeys tells you that it is missing something.

The result is as good as CorePlus remastered for german Keyboard (see Wiki http://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/wiki:remastering_kmap_iso).

Now I could de.kmap.bin to /usr/share/kmap/de.kmap but that will not be persistent and most probably overwritten on the next reboot.

Now, I don't have any clue what whould be the correct boot code to have that layout permanently. As far as I understand it, boot code kmap=layout tells the kernel to use /usr/share/kmaps/layout.kmap as binary dump of the kernel keymap.

I have put the binary keymap to a directory in the root of my USB stick, so I can do a loadkmap < de.kmap after reboot, but I don't like it too much ...


But how do I make that permanent?

What should I do now?

--
  Bernhard

[Jason W]

It looks to me like placing the names of those SCE extensions in sceboot.lst, backing up the resulting files from the gunzip commands, and then placing the loadkeys and loadkmap commands in /opt/bootlocal.sh should do it.

[bernhard]

It looks to me like placing the names of those SCE extensions in sceboot.lst, backing up the resulting files from the gunzip commands, and then placing the loadkeys and loadkmap commands in /opt/bootlocal.sh should do it.

thanks, I don't think that any file of the extensions is necessary at all. The extensions were necessary to create the binary keymap. I think it might sufficient to place the loadkmap command in /opt/bootlocal.sh and have the german keymap in some persistent directory.

How does bootlocal.sh persist?
--
  Bernhard

[Jason W]

Simply using the backup function will persist /opt/bootlocal.sh, it is by default in /opt/.filetool.lst.

More about persistence is explained in the wiki:

http://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/wiki:backup

[bernhard]

Simply using the backup function will persist /opt/bootlocal.sh, it is by default in /opt/.filetool.lst.
More about persistence is explained in the wiki:
http://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/wiki:backup

thanks.

In the last section "Using Commands" was the important piece of information I missed until now.

[Jason W]

Actually, at the end of that page it lists the backup device as listed in /opt/.backup_device.

It is now in /etc/sysconfig/backup_device at least on dCore.