From: Heather <star@betelgeuse.starshine.org>
Subject: Re: customization
To: Mags <who_let_the_idiots_out@yahoo.com>
CC: lnx-bbc@zork.net
Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2002 02:07:46 -0800 (PST)

> hi...
> can i add some patches or rather other software apart
> from what is shipped by linuxcare on lnx-bbc bootable
> CD. If yes, how am i to do that??
> 
> Later,
> Mags
> GNUdist("i code naked")

Linuxcare has their own version, which I believe they call their LBT 
(Linuxcare Bootable Toolkit).  LBT and LNX-BBC are different codebases.  
In a past life the Bootable Business Card had been a Linuxcare project, 
but it was split into two projects sometime shortly after Linuxcare had
major layoffs, and neither of the new ones resembles the old one much 
except in that both still use cloop filesystems.  What I can help you 
with directly, and what this team on the list can help you with, is the 
LNX-BBC. 

That said, yes, you certainly can.  You have two choices about how to
do it:

1. you can peel away the parts of the load sequence like an onion, put
   your own parts in, then pack it back up again.  I use this method 
   quite a bit myself so I can give you the "short form" of it.

2. you can rsync yourself a copy of the 1.618 build environment and use 
   it to put together a fresh one to your own specs.  Notes *should*
   be on the website (www.lnx-bbc.org) for this.  Please tell us if you 
   can't find them :)

If there's some particularly cool stuff in there you'd like to see and you 
feel that a lot of people could use it, let us know;  there is a list 
dedicated to discussions by the team working on the next version, called
lnx-bbc-devel.

Of course, there are over 600 packages on the 1.618 so, it's also possible
that what you're looking for might actually be in there and you hadn't seen
it yet... or we might have chosen an app that does that thing, but from some
tiny toolkit you never heard of.  You didn't mention what it is you wanted :)

The short form, popping open a 1.618 LNX-BBC:

   a. the floppy image
	On the minidisc image, there's a file named lnx.img.  This is 
	the bits for a 1.44 floppy.  The floppy in question is a syslinux
	boot diskette with a kernel and a ramdisk image.

   b. the ramdisk image
	Is a gzipped ext3 if I recall correctly.

   c. the raw cd
	is of course iso9660, and it has some interesting bits.  The most
        interesting to you by far would be /bin/init (check path, but I
        think /bin and /sbin are the same beastie) which happens to be a
        shell script.  Examine most closely the part where it invokes
        cloop by feeding it the singularity image.  Somewhat less odd
        but still interesting is the part where it sets up getty on a few
        consoles so you feel like you got a normal init startup.

   d. the cloop filesystem
	loading the cloop module and giving it the compressed "singularity"
        decompresses the zlib-ext3 filesystem found in that file.  We make
        this by setting up some disk space the way we like, then using
        'create_compressed_fs' to build it.  'extract_compressed_fs' will
        decompress a singularity without having to use cloop.o first.  Both
        of these are built using the cloop source code (housed at Klaus
        Knopper's site, we surely have a link to it on our website).

The things inside the cloop filesystem have usually been rebuilt so they 
expect their libraries to be at the place that we have them -- and have 
almost always been stripped a bit, since we're trying to save space here.
The bizcard-CD media that we used is only 50 MB, so even with excellent
compression, 600+ apps is a tight fit.  However if you're planning to burn
to bigger media (for instance, those "CD singles" that have become so popular
for digital cameras and audiophiles, are about 196 MB) you may not worry so
carefully as we did about the byte count.

Have fun hacking ...

* Heather * The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of 
            them to choose from.  -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum