Monkeydust.net

Well, i figured i should at least post something here Thanks to beandog for adding me planet larry, although lately my work with linux has taken a downturn. For those who somehow found my blog beforehand (ie. no one) would have known ive been playing around with building a gentoo based livecd. Thats had to take a backseat for now, its still something i want to do, even if using catalyst can be a pain at times. My thinking now is that im going to save myself some trouble and use sysrescuecd as a base as they too use catalyst and seem to have working X autoconfig (which was my main stumbling block), they also have a few other cool bits that i like, so it makes sense to start with them.

Ive also started a new job lately which has left me with more free time, but due to an early start im more tired so what free time i have is being used up with me being tired and lazy, lately thats meant playing eve-online and not doing stuff i should be.

Im determined to get something done, who knows, maybe il finish off this livecd soon!

So, ive finally managed to find a bit of free time now that work allows me the whole weekend to myself so ive been playing around with building a gentoo based livecd. Ive previously tried using catalyst, the official tool used by gentoo to build their livecd’s but its not exactly intuitive so ive been using a somewhat more manual way as detailed over on the gentoo wiki.

As with many wiki articles through its less of a guide and more of a jumble of ideas thrown onto a wiki page, which is a shame as if you dig through the crap there are quite a few handy tips and the basis for some scripts to simplify the process a bit. Ive taken many of these and hacked them around a bit to create something a bit easier to reuse. At the minute theres not much there, really just scripts to automate mounting, unmounting and generating the squashfs and cd image however ive a few more ideas id like to add based on stuff ive found useful while working on my cds.

Hopefully il have a basic x86 cd ready to go sometime in the next few days, sadly i suspect i broke the amd64 one  when i got a little bit carried away tried to use openrc/baselayout2 on the livecd, while mostly it worked a few of the changes seem to have broken the hardware detection scripts used and i cant find any fixes, so looks like im starting from scratch again

What i am trying to decide on though is what to include on the livecds in terms of software, so far ive got networkmanager and possibly OSSv4 (initially disabled, but could be a nice way for people to test if it works for them), after that though i get a bit stuck, il probably throw in some more wifi drivers and thats it, im open to suggestions through