Combo remaster and live extensions problem (dependency)

[malicske]

Hey everyone,

First I'm really glad with this tiny distro. Small, fast and very important modular!
A fresh start after every boot, I have been trying to get the same effect with debian. Using live-builder made custom iso's, added some scripts. And voila, 1 squashfs with my entire distro, freshly installed, copied into ram. Running smooth.
To update the system is just replacing the squashfs.
After reading articles off people booting linux under 1 sec. I wondered how to improve my pc's boot time.
And that's how I ended up here.
I would like to have a small distro boots up under 5 secs and it only needs to be able to browse.

So I have a few questions, but I will start with this one.

I have remastered Tiny core 3.8 with Xfce4,alsa, firefox and flash. Resulting in a tinycore.gz of 60Mb. Amazing, all this in 60MB!!!
The plan is to do a combo, boot this remastered tc, after boot through the bootlocal.sh tce-load other programs.

So far so good, except when I install a extension, the allready installed extensions are not recognized and therefore downloaded again and reinstalled!
Did i forgot to do something? Because when I open up systemstats -> installed, I see the extensions listed inside the intird image.

Thank you

[danielibarnes]

I have remastered Tiny core 3.8 with Xfce4,alsa, firefox and flash.

You will need to describe how you remastered. There are many techniques, but my guess is that you extracted the .tcz into your tinycore.gz.

I would like to have a small distro boots up under 5 secs

One of the biggest delays when booting up is the loading of extensions. If you delay the loading of alsa, firefox, flash, and any other extensions which are not necessary for getting to X then you can significantly decrease your bootup time.

[malicske]

Thank you for your reply,

Sorry I didn't give enough information.
It is as you guessed, extracted inside the tinycore.gz.

So during boot there is no installation of tcz packages.
(Well, there is, but not through the "onboot.lst". In the startup script /opt/bootlocal.sh i added some tce-loads, but this doesn't add to the boot time I beleive, because it is parallel)

So the loaded extensions don't "see" the allready installed packages.
For example, install ristretto through appbrowser, downloads and loads all xfce4 libs again but mounted in /dev/loopx

[danielibarnes]

When you remaster, it is better to use the /opt/tce method. Less memory usage that way, and updating extensions is much easier. My qremaster script can help with that.

[malicske]

When you remaster, it is better to use the /opt/tce method. Less memory usage that way, and updating extensions is much easier. My qremaster script can help with that.

Thanks I will look into it.
Is it also a fast way to boot? Extracting inside the tinycore.gz is fast because nothing needs to be done on boot.
Will my problem with dependencies be solved?

[danielibarnes]

Is it also a fast way to boot?

It will likely be slower, but still fast. There are methods to measure it if you are interested in quantifying the difference.

Will my problem with dependencies be solved?

I believe so. If not, reply with exact details and I can try to reproduce.

[ixbrian]

When you remaster, it is better to use the /opt/tce method. Less memory usage that way, and updating extensions is much easier. My qremaster script can help with that.

I don't think there is a clear "better" method of remastering.   There are trade offs depending on the method you use.   For example, extracting the extensions to the initrd will result in a faster boot of the system and also probably a smaller ISO image versus the /opt/tce method.    The trade off is more memory usage (but faster access since extensions aren't on a compressed filesystem) and the fact that Tiny Core won't recognise extracted extensions as already being installed when adding more extensions (which isn't an issue if you won't be downloading additional extensions, i.e. you are making a single purpose appliance remaster).   

The "better" method all depends on what is most important to you and what trade offs your willing to make. 

Brian

[danielibarnes]

I realized I don't have an option in qremaster to extract the .tcz into a cpio archive like malicske chose to do. That is a useful feature, so I'll add it when I get a chance. It will make comparisons between the two methods much easier.

[ixbrian]

I did a comparison awhile ago, here are the results:

http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,7002.msg36897.html#msg36897

[ixbrian]

I forgot to mention, another thing I really like about extracting extensions in to a remaster is that they really become part of the base system.   

A good example:  I don't use the qwerty keyboard layout, so I need the kmaps.tcz extension.   If I remaster and extract kmaps.tcz into the initrd then I am able to bootup with the "base" bootcode (which is very useful from time to time) and still have access to the keyboard layouts by default.   

[malicske]

The priority goes to fast boot. I'm using this on a computer with 4GB of ram. So the memory won't be an issue.

I asked this question to know if there would be a way for tiny core to know wich extensions are allready extracted in the tinycore.gz.
Appearently there is not a way.
I realize my case here is a special one.
So I'm fine with it :-)

PS: Currently my system with xfce, alsa, firefox and flash with wireless connection setup boots  a little under 13s. The tiny core default base in 10s