MinimaLinux

ttylinux mailing list - ttylinux google group

2010-09-06T19:17:48Z

I created a ttylinux group http://groups.google.com/group/ttylinux with the intention of using it for a mailing list. If you are interested in a ttylinux mailing list then please join and post messages.

I'd rather use a standard mail list manager, but someone would need to host it. Is anyone interested in hosting one? If so email me at douglas@ttylinux.net.

How to build add-ons

2010-09-06T01:09:33Z

I've been looking around for a guide to building add-ons and packages for ttylinux. Is a there a guide? If not, could someone explain the process. What are the pkg-cfg tarballs for? I'd like to add quite a few bits and pieces to ttylinux, its a brilliant little distro. It'd be nice to build up a sizable central repository for it to make it more customizable and configurable for users.

thanks for all your work

tom

Easier busybox configuration

2010-09-04T06:32:11Z

Making even minor changes to the busybox configuration in ttylinux can be quite tedious:

1. The configuration files are locked away inside a tarball, which means making a change involves extracting the tarball, copying the config file over to a busybox source tree, running your favorite flavor of "make config" and changing the settings from there, then copying the resulting config file back into the extracted config directory, and re-archiving the config tarball.

2. The config folder contains a list of _files which must also be hand-edited to reflect any additions or deletions to the busybox applet list. If you forget this step, it is likely that either the build will fail, or your newly-configured applets won't be included in the package.

So I made some changes to the build script that I hope will help relieve these issues:

Problem #1 is addressed by looking in the user's ./site/ folder for files named "bb-config-norm" and/or "bb-config-suid". If either (or both) of these files is present, they will be used instead of the file contained in the cfg-* tarball.

Problem #2 is addressed by dynamically creating the _files list "on-the-fly" by examining the build-root directory for links to busybox and busybox-suid, and searching the contents of the ./rootfs/ subdirectories of the cfg-* and site folders.

Using this setup, it is even possible that "./site/bb-config-norm" could be
a symbolic link to the .config in an external busybox source tree, so you
can run "make config" from there, and then build the ttylinux busybox
package as usual, and your changes will be reflected automatically.

Also, if there is a directory named ./site/rootfs/ any files placed there will be copied into the build-root directory and added to the _files list. If any of these filenames also exist in the config tarball's rootfs folder, the files in the ./site/rootfs/ folder take precedence. This makes it much easier to make llittle personalized tweaks to the system-wide configuration files, for example customizing your /etc/profile or /etc/inputrc files.

Be warned that ttylinux requires several of the busybox applets at boot-up, so some care should be taken if you remove any applets from the default configuration.

You can find the revised version of the ./pkg-bld/bld-busybox-1.16.1.sh script here:
http://jkp.t35.com/bld-busybox-1.16.1.sh

Running ttylinux in qemu as pair: kernel + img.file (ramdisk optional)

2010-09-04T00:44:49Z

Hi again. Hope you'll help me...again ;=)

I'm trying run ttylinux in qemu/qemu-system-x86_64, using this sintax:

qemu
 -boot c 
 -kernel vmlinuz 
 -append root=/dev/sda1 
 -drive file=filesys,if=scsi,index=0,boot=on

filesys i got from "ttylinux User Guide" (3.4.5 Manual Installation - Setup and Installation -> Install a ttylinux to Boot with File System on a Hard Drive). Is it right?

files vmlinuz/filesys was from ttylinux-x86_64-11.2.iso

When i run this, i got error:

VFS: Cannot open root device "sda1" or unknown-block(0,0)
Please append a correct "root=" boot option; here are the available partitions:
1600 4194302 hdc driver: ide-cdrom
....

I have to suggestions:
1. Kernel doesn't support SATA interface
2. Need ramdisk (--initrd )

Can you give my right direction?

ttylinux-setup help

2010-09-03T02:04:25Z

Hey, I'm relatively new to ttylinux and need some help.

I'm interested in learning how distributions are built, so I decided to look at some smaller distros and do it myself. I looked around all the usual ones like Damn Small Linux, tomsrtbt, Tiny Core Linux and some others and eventually settled on ttylinux.

I've just completed my first build of ttylinux (it boots and everything! Whoooo!) and now I'm looking at customising it for my own needs.

My questions are these:
Where abouts is /config/ttylinux-setup called from?
What is ttylinux-cdrom doing at the end of the append string in isolinux.cfg?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Henry

usb flash disk revisited

2010-09-02T19:35:43Z

WARNING: Only follow if you have no fear and will only blame yourself
if it doesn't work out. All I can say is it works for me.

On my current root/boot the usb flashdisk shows up as sdc;

root@xena [ ~ ]# dmesg | grep "sdc"
sd 10:0:0:0: [sdc] 4014080 512-byte logical blocks: (2.05 GB/1.91 GiB)
sd 10:0:0:0: [sdc] Write Protect is off
sd 10:0:0:0: [sdc] Mode Sense: 00 00 00 00
sd 10:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through
sd 10:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through
sdc: sdc1
sd 10:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through
d 10:0:0:0: [sdc] Attached SCSI removable disk

Note the "4014080 512-byte logical blocks" part. If I want to speed up
dd I require larger block sizes but in the interest of doing things the
slow and 'safe' way I'll go with the defaults which will wipe clean the
entire disk so make sure you're putting in the correct sd!!! This will
take awhile so this is a good time to have a coffee break.

1) dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc count=4014080

output on my system;

4014080+0 records in
4014080+0 records out
2055208960 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 788.874 s, 2.6 MB/s

Now that dd is finished;

2) fdisk /dev/sdc

You should see something like this;

Device contains neither a valid DOS partition table, nor Sun, SGI or OSF disklabel
Building a new DOS disklabel with disk identifier 0xa02aa50a.
Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them.
After that, of course, the previous content won't be recoverable.

Warning: invalid flag 0x0000 of partition table 4 will be corrected by w(rite)

WARNING: DOS-compatible mode is deprecated. It's strongly recommended to
switch off the mode (command 'c') and change display units to
sectors (command 'u').

In my case I am going to create only one partition but feel free to make
as many as you think you want. If so then I suggest at least the first
one be big enough to accomadate the kernel(s) and rootfs(s).

After creating, activating it committing it to a write "fdisk -l /dev/sdc"
reports;

Disk /dev/sdc: 2055 MB, 2055208960 bytes
64 heads, 62 sectors/track, 1011 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 3968 * 512 = 2031616 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xa02aa50a

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 * 1 1011 2005793 83 Linux

Looking good!

3) mke2fs /dev/sdc1

This outputs;

mke2fs 1.41.12 (17-May-2010)
Filesystem label=
OS type: Linux
Block size=4096 (log=2)
Fragment size=4096 (log=2)
Stride=0 blocks, Stripe width=0 blocks
125440 inodes, 501448 blocks
25072 blocks (5.00%) reserved for the super user
First data block=0
Maximum filesystem blocks=515899392
16 block groups
32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group
7840 inodes per group
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912

Writing inode tables: done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done

This filesystem will be automatically checked every 39 mounts or
180 days, whichever comes first. Use tune2fs -c or -i to override.

4) mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/usbdisk

5) install -d /mnt/usbdisk/{boot,etc}

Mount the iso

6) mount -o loop /mnt/archives/ttylinux/source/ttylinux-i686-11.1.iso /mnt/iso
7) install -m644 /mnt/iso/boot/vmlinuz /mnt/usbdisk/boot/vmlinuz-i686
8) install -m644 /mnt/iso/boot/filesys.gz /mnt/usbdisk/boot/filesys-i686.gz
9) umount /mnt/iso/
10) mount -o loop \
/mnt/archives/ttylinux/source/ttylinux-x86_64-11.1.iso /mnt/iso
11) install -m644 /mnt/iso/boot/vmlinuz /mnt/usbdisk/boot/vmlinuz-x86_64
12) install -m644 /mnt/iso/boot/filesys.gz /mnt/usbdisk/boot/filesys-x86_64.gz
13) umount /mnt/iso

"ls -al /mnt/usbdisk/boot/" should report something like this;

drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jun 26 00:12 ./
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Jun 26 00:03 ../
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2519428 Jun 26 00:08 filesys-i686.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2969607 Jun 26 00:12 filesys-x86_64.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4352736 Jun 26 00:07 vmlinuz-i686
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4519968 Jun 26 00:12 vmlinuz-x86_64

Big kernels by the way. ;-)

Now the fun begins. I'll have step 14 all set below the 14) part to
facillitate cutting and pasting;

14)

cat > /mnt/usbdisk/etc/lilo.conf << "EOF"
disk=/dev/sdc bios=0x80
boot = /dev/sdc
map=/mnt/usbdisk/boot/map
large-memory
lba32
compact
prompt
timeout = 1200
image = /mnt/usbdisk/boot/vmlinuz-i686
root = /dev/ram0
initrd = /mnt/usbdisk/boot/filesys-i686.gz
label = ttylinux32
read-only
image = /mnt/usbdisk/boot/vmlinuz-x86_64
root = /dev/ram0
initrd = /mnt/usbdisk/boot/filesys-x86_64.gz
label = ttylinux64
read-only
EOF

15) lilo -C /mnt/usbdisk/etc/lilo.conf

should output;

Added ttylinux32 *
Added ttylinux64

16) umount /mnt/usbdisk

Let's see if it worked. Be back after trying both.

Meanwhile back at the ranch;

BINGO!!! They both booted up and I successfully logged in as user root.

I am just too awesome. Hm. How much am I getting paid for this? ;-)

Life is good,
Maurice

udev and makding new device nodes

2010-08-31T19:20:50Z

I have some USB sensors I'm hooking up.

Though these sensors show up just fine in the appropriate places in /proc and /sys, no device nodes in /dev are created (as far as I can tell).

I assume this is because the device node creation rules normally in rules.d have been stripped out?

What is the expected practice for ttylinux for accomplishing this? Should I figure out the major/minor device numbers that my sensors use, then use mknod in an add-on script to add these to base filesystem?

Thanks,
Greg

suitable archiving and compression for ttylinux

2010-08-31T18:23:22Z

Hey All ... especially Douglas!

I propose that future releases of ttylinux disable archiving and compression in busybox in favour of the actual supported and more acceptable applications. Other then tar and bxip2 which are requirements for ttylinux's packaging scheme they could be addon packages although I am inclined to argue that all of them - xz has become the compression of choice here for the little compression I actually use - should be part and parcel of the ttylinux distribution given the off and on flakiness of the busybox's replication of these applications.

I have taken the liberty of experimenting with the idea and it cost me less than 850k to add tar-1.23, bzip2-1.0.5, gzip-1.4 and xz-4.999.9beta into the mix. Given the additional functionality it affords ttylinux I am concluding it is a very small price to pay.

Life is good,
Maurice

Problem building the last (?) ttylinux on mandriva

2010-08-31T14:40:10Z

Hi ! I have downloaded the ttylinux-src-mp3.tar.bz2 from the website, extracted it and tried to start the build process. I started by the cross-compiler, make setup and the download worked fine. However, the next steps does not work :

[curis@info124 cross-tools-2.11-2.6.30.5]$ make x86_64

Building cross-development tool chain.
Host: i586-mandriva-linux-gnu
Target: x86_64-generic-linux-gnu
Tools: binutils-2.20 gcc-4.3.4 [gmp-4.3.2, mpfr-2.4.2]
GLIBC: glibc-2.11
Kernel: x86_64 linux-2.6.30.5

../_scripts/ttylinux-linux-gnu.sh: line 1402: ${XBT_TARGET_DIR}/_log.1.binutils: ambiguous redirect

[curis@info124 cross-tools-2.11-2.6.30.5]$ make i686

Building cross-development tool chain.
Host: i586-mandriva-linux-gnu
Target: i686-generic-linux-gnu
Tools: binutils-2.20 gcc-4.3.4 [gmp-4.3.2, mpfr-2.4.2]
GLIBC: glibc-2.11
Kernel: i386 linux-2.6.30.5

../_scripts/ttylinux-linux-gnu.sh: line 1402: ${XBT_TARGET_DIR}/_log.1.binutils: ambiguous redirect

(so it does not seem to be an issue with the fact I have a 32 bit linux on the building environnement). Here a few informations about the host :

[curis@info124 cross-tools-2.11-2.6.30.5]$ uname -a
Linux info124 2.6.22.18-desktop586-1mdv #1 SMP Mon Feb 11 12:21:41 EST 2008 i686 Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E4400 @ 2.00GHz GNU/Linux

[curis@info124 cross-tools-2.11-2.6.30.5]$ cat /etc/mandriva-release
Mandriva Linux release 2008.0 (Official) for i586

[curis@info124 cross-tools-2.11-2.6.30.5]$ bash --version
GNU bash, version 3.2.17(2)-release (i586-mandriva-linux-gnu)
Copyright (C) 2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

(by the way, creating USB images from the ISO works fine, however I'm afraid I need additional kernel modules to access Reiser-FS file systems so I can't afford the build step...)

Thanks for any help

PS : I've seen the post on redirection problem in Ubuntu, but since I do not use Ubuntu and it occurs at a different place, I think it is a different one...

New add-ons page

2010-08-29T16:12:06Z

After far too long, I finally got around to updating my add-ons page for ttylinux.

Most of the programs are updated versions from my old ttylinux 8.0 add-ons, but they have been updated to the latest release versions and packaged for ttylinux 11.2.

There are also a few notable additions: "btpd", an amazingly small bit-torrent client, "polarssl" (a small SSL/TLS and cryptography library) along with SSL-enabled versions of the "mini_httpd" webserver and the "curl" web client.

The compiled binaries are only for i686, the build scripts might (or might not) work for other platforms. I'd be happy to hear any success/failure you have with them, and of course any other feedback is welcome too.

You can find it all right here: http://jkp.t35.com/

Enjoy!

- Jeff

Problem exporting headers when building cross-tool chain

2010-08-28T22:44:27Z

I have a fresh install (plus all packages listed in How_to_build_ttylinux.txt) of Fedora 13 x86_64 that I'm using as a host system to build ttylinux. I downloaded ttylinux-src-mp3.tar.bz2, extracted it and followed the instructions. It worked perfectly until I ran 'make i486'. It follows through until 'Exporting i386 kernel header files', and then I get this in the _log.3.kernel_headers.

Finding, uncompressing, untarring linux-2.6.20
Using /home/dinzdale/ttylinux_build/ttylinux-src-mp3/cross-tools-2.9-2.6.20/_pkg-src/linux-2.6.20.tar.bz2
Exporting i386 kernel header files (i486-generic-linux-gnu).
scripts/basic/fixdep.c: In function 'traps':
scripts/basic/fixdep.c:371: warning: dereferencing type-punned pointer will break strict-aliasing rules
scripts/basic/fixdep.c:373: warning: dereferencing type-punned pointer will break strict-aliasing rules
scripts/unifdef.c:209: error: conflicting types for 'getline'
/usr/include/stdio.h:673: note: previous declaration of 'getline' was here
make[2]: *** [scripts/unifdef] Error 1
make[1]: *** [headers_install] Error 2

Anyone have any idea what's going on here? I'm new to building systems, so I might be missing something simple.

wget problem on ttylinux in VirtualBox OSE

2010-08-22T21:46:25Z

I'm running ttylinux-i686-11.2.iso as a VM in VirtualBox OSE on Ubuntu 10.04 x64. I'm attempting to download Bitcoin using ...

wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/bitcoin/Bitcoin/bitcoin-0.3.10/bitcoin-0.3.10-linux.tar.gz

The download reaches ~40% and then fails, reporting "short write". It's only a 7.9MB file. I've given the VM far more memory (1GB) and disk (300MB) than it should need. I've explicitly tried a few of the mirrors, and they all failed at ~40%.

What am I missing?

Edit: I did try extracting, with no joy.

Edit2: I forgot to mention that the host is running a VPN, and the VM is NATed.

Problem with the tar version of ttylinux

2010-08-21T03:35:05Z

Yet another problem discovered trying to use ttylinux as a backup solution... The tar version of ttylinux (busybox tar if I correctly understood) stops while untarring the tar (generated by GNU-tar of the Mandriva 2010) because of accentuated characters in extracted file names.
The tar is made from a NTFS partition and rewrote on a NTFS partition mounted with NTFS-3G, I'm not quite sure which coding is used, but the problem is clearly due to accents in some systems files of Windows XP ["Start" folder is called "Menu Démarrer" in the French version], so I definitely must keep these accents!
Since it works perfectly when using GNU tar, I think the ttylinux-tar has the problem...
Any hints if there is a way to correct this? Thanks...

Unable adding new programs on the ttylinux x86_64 ramdisk

2010-08-20T03:13:10Z

Hi ! I try to use ttylinux to create an PC configuration & installation USB key which would easily prepare student computers with both XP and linux.
I first used the x686 ttylinux, and since I need a few additional softwares to do the process, I did the following steps:
1) mounting the ISO image with the loop device
2) copy boot/filesys.gz on the harddisk & gunzip it
3) unmounting the ISO image
4) mounting the filesys with the loop device
5) adding required software, pre-compiled [source : Mandriva 2008 32 bits] : sfdisk, grub, mkntfs, mkreiserfs and libraries: libncurses, libntfs.
adding also the ntfs-3g add-on
6) compress the filesys [gzip -c filesys > filesys.gz]
7) replace on the (working) USB key with ttylinux the /boot/filesys.gz by the new version

It worked perfectly. Unfortunately, the windows tar.bz2 image is too big (2.3 Go) and cannot be accesses. So I tried to do the same thing with the x86_64 version of ttylinux, using softs from mandriva 2010.1 64 bits.
But it does not work, with very strange messages:
# ls /sbin/
(...) sfdisk (...)

so /sbin/sfdisk is present
# sfdisk
bash: /sbin/sfdisk: no such file or directory

Same thing with mkntfs, in /usr/sbin

It looks like the filesystem directory get modified but the file is physically absent or something similar...
Does anybody have any hint about such an issue? How is it possible to modify the x86_64 ramdisk image?

Many thanks in advance... For the moment, I managed to use the 32-bits version to partition the disk with sfdisk, format it with mkntfs/mkreiserfs/mke2fs... and the 64-bit version for untaring the partitions images... But it is definitely not the best practical way, I would like to do both on a single ttylinux...

Unable to build ttylinux on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

2010-08-19T17:27:29Z

Hello,

I'm trying to build ttylinux.
I successfully prepared the crosscompiler :

...ttylinux-src-mp3/cross-tools-2.11-2.6.30.5/_scripts# ./test-i686.sh 
Checking simple i686-generic-linux-gnu target C cross compile... Seems OK.
Checking simple i686-generic-linux-gnu target C++ cross compile... Seems OK.

But the make dist doesn't start correctly :

...ttylinux-src-mp3# make dist

Remove the ttylinux build.
=> Removing development build directories.
=> Removing boot CD configuration.
=> Removing binary packages.
=> Removing build logs.

./ttylinux.dist-config.sh: 86: Syntax error: redirection unexpected
make: *** [init] Erreur 2

This is this line who has a problem :

read TTYLINUX_CPU TTYLINUX_PLATFORM TTYLINUX_GL_ARCH <<<${TTYLINUX_TARGET//:/ }

Has somebody an idear ?

Thank you in advance !

Best regards

Piziwate