Berryboot and Picore

[loggedin]

Hi,
Haven't read through forum yet, there might be an answer.

Looking at Berryboot, as an option to boot live.
I put Berryboot files at \, and am putting Picorex files there too for now.
I am not near the Pi now.

Berryboot is supposed to install OSes from the internet. Can one specify (unzipped) image files to boot?
I used Grub4dos a lot, so some similar commands would be nice.

Any other OSes I could try live?
Will Berryboot or Picore try to partition/format the initial drive? Or does it leave it unchanged (live)?

Another question,
if I decide to install a say 1Gb OS to a 32Gb SD, can I have the FAT32 partition as big as poss (for use in Windows or camera),
while having the Pi OSes further?


Thank you!

[bmarkus]

Do not know what other OS's and Berryboot is doing.

You can forget Grub4dos working with Raspberry Pi. It has its own boot system with Device Tree.

You can have as big FAT32 partition as you want and you can keep your downloaded extensions and configuration files, backup on FAT32 partition. However it is not the best practice as FAT32 is not journaling FS so not protected against potential corruption. Also you may need SWAP.

piCore do not change partioning scheme and do not format partitions on its own. Everyting is under your control.

[loggedin]

Cool, thanks for the reply.

I would probably keep downloaded extensions and config files (if not required at boot) on system drive (EXT) if existant.
Would keep music, videos, spreadsheets on FAT32.
Can't Picore go "live" just from the bootloader file + image file, like isos used to do?
You say Picore doesn't partition/format on its own. Everything under my control. But do I even NEED to format at some point?
Will it go bootloader>kernel+inirtd>Ram (Desktop)?
Therefore, a non-install OS.

[loggedin]

It's basically usually I like to extract an OS manually (say Slax), before running it from USB or SD.
Reading http://www.maketecheasier.com/review-of-picore/ it seems to have to use Win32diskimager.
I would rather have files extracted to root (manually), and have a loader (loader.bin?) and config file to boot something
(piCore with its own conf. files) to RAM.
As a big user of Grub4dos, I am so used to booting TinyCore and other OSes with config files that I'm being inquisitive.

Say root:
/loader.bin
/configfiles
/pikernel
/initrd.gz

Bear in mind I am flooding with questions, but when I get down to it I'll be Ok .

[archieb0ld]

Have you had any luck with Berryboot? Maybe you could post a follow-up?
Looking at the manual (http://www.berryterminal.com/doku.php/berryboot/adding_custom_distributions), they suggest getting rid of the FAT partition with the boot loader and kernel files.
So I was wondering whether it is OK to remove this first partition considering piCore is different from the *regular* distributions.
Just to be clear: the project I'm currently working on requires Berryboot, so I have to use it.
Any help would be greatly appreciated

[bmarkus]

Talk to author of Berryboot how to use it with piCore and add support if necessary.

[archieb0ld]

maybe you can then comment on the error I get following the instructions? Is there something wrong/special with the piCore image? Seems this error is quite old, and I'm still getting this with piCore 7.0 trying to mount the image file (only the numbers are different, obviously).

while following http://www.berryterminal.com/doku.php/berryboot/adding_custom_distributions , I get stuck here

Code: [Select]

$ sudo kpartx -av piCore-5.3-SSH.img
add map loop1p1 (252:1): 0 43008 linear /dev/loop1 2048
device-mapper: resume ioctl on loop1p2 failed: Invalid argument
create/reload failed on loop1p2
add map loop1p2 (0:0): 0 19584 linear /dev/loop1 45056


[bmarkus]

Even no idea what is kpartx. It is not in piCore base nor repo.

device-mapper stuff may require kernel modules not in base, etc.

As I already advised, talk to BerryBoot author, use BerryBoot support forum, mailing list whatever they have.

[bmarkus]

maybe you can then comment on the error I get following the instructions? Is there something wrong/special with the piCore image? Seems this error is quite old, and I'm still getting this with piCore 7.0 trying to mount the image file (only the numbers are different, obviously).

while following http://www.berryterminal.com/doku.php/berryboot/adding_custom_distributions , I get stuck here

Code: [Select]

$ sudo kpartx -av piCore-5.3-SSH.img
add map loop1p1 (252:1): 0 43008 linear /dev/loop1 2048
device-mapper: resume ioctl on loop1p2 failed: Invalid argument
create/reload failed on loop1p2
add map loop1p2 (0:0): 0 19584 linear /dev/loop1 45056


It is a kpartx bug. Check dmesg, partition is too small.

BTW I get the same kpartx error on the latest CentOS7 too.

[archieb0ld]

Thanks for the info.

Still waiting for an answer from Berryboot maintainer, but I have found a similar closed bug from 2013 where the problem was with the .img file and the second partition was corrupt (https://github.com/maxnet/berryboot/issues/4). I have checked the piCore image with fdisk and the partitions aren't overlapping or out-of-bounds, it seems.

Out of curiosity, I also opened piCore-6.0-SSH.img and piCore-6.1-SSH.img with kpartx. The first was opened without any problem, but the second throws the same error.

7-Zip on Windows behaves the same way, throwing '1.img file is broken' for 7.0 and 6.1, but not 6.0

[bmarkus]

6.0 image was working fine except online resize of mmcblk0p2 did not work due to the different partition layout. It was fixed in 6.1

[archieb0ld]

ok, so I spent some time researching the kpartx issue and made some observations.
kpartx works perfectly fine with the following images:

Code: [Select]

piCore-5.2.2-SSH.img
piCore-6.0-SSH.img
piCore-6.0-X.img

and doesn't with these:

Code: [Select]

piCore-5.2.1-SSH.img
piCore-5.3-SSH.img
piCore-5.3.1-SSH.img
piCore-6.1-SSH.img
piCore-6.1-X.img
piCore-7.0.img

The only pattern I could find is that FDISK reports even number of sectors for the working .img files with numbers adding up correctly (2048+19584+43008=64640) like:

Code: [Select]

Disk piCore-5.2.2-SSH.img: 31.6 MiB, 33095680 bytes, 64640 sectors
Device                Boot Start   End Sectors  Size Id Type
piCore-5.2.2-SSH.img1       2048 45055   43008   21M  6 FAT16
piCore-5.2.2-SSH.img2      45056 64639   19584  9.6M 83 Linux

and odd numbers and sum mismatch (2048+43008+19584 !=64639) for the faulty ones:

Code: [Select]

Disk piCore-5.3.1-SSH.img: 31.6 MiB, 33095168 bytes, 64639 sectors
Device                Boot Start   End Sectors  Size Id Type
piCore-5.3.1-SSH.img1       2048 45055   43008   21M  6 FAT16
piCore-5.3.1-SSH.img2      45056 64639   19584  9.6M 83 Linux

How can I alter the images and make those numbers add up?

[manit123]

Been a long time .
Still - can anyone comment on integrating picore in berryboot ?
That would be fantastic .
I would love to see picore with gui boot on my raspberry pi b+ via berryboot.
would be pretty useful .
thanks.

Or should I start a new thread ?

[manit123]

i tried to compile squashfs for piCore-6.0-X.img
there was no fstab file in second partition of image
so
#sed -i 's/^\/dev\/mmcblk/#\0/g' /mnt/etc/fstab
could not be executed.
The converted_image_for_berryboot.img  got added in berryboot menu but on booting gave error for a short time
unable to  locate or execute /sbin/init /usr/lib/systemd/systemd init inside converted_image_for_berryboot.img
Then dropped me to squashfs prompt .

I think https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=56&t=116975&p=796114&hilit=berryboot#p796114 is relevant here .
Experts can resolve this .

Thanks.

[timoteo]

I request piCore-9.0.3

This is the answer

Code: [Select]

I'm afraid PiCore Player images will not work with Berryboot due partitions issues. However, I'll keep trying with future versions of this OS.
 
Thanks for the request.