Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[brucehohl]

With Puppy 4.1.0:

Successful remaster attempt:
1- I booted puppy with "puppy pfix=ram".
2- I added a few packages and other changes.
3- I ran Menu > Setup > Remaster Puppy Live-CD.
The ISO was created successfully.

Failed remaster attempt:
In step 1 above I did not use "puppy pfix=ram" in order to capture changes from an existing pup_save.2fs. In this case the "Remaster Puppy Live-CD" script stopped before completing the first step (first message box).

Question:
Is that approach allowed? That is, can I include in my remaster changes from an existing pup_save.2fs?

[Béèm]

Not long ago there was a discussion about remastering and include the pup_save.
I think the boot was with pfix=ram and at a certain point the pup_save could be added.
Reason is, if I remember well, that a mounted resource can't be added, hence the pfix=ram

Look with the puppysearch link in my sig if you can find the thread.
Probably remaster is a good search key.

[brucehohl]

Beem, thanks for that response. I did see this thread: http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?search_id=869988618&t=34839 which seems to indicate that a pup_save.2fs file can be included in a Remastered CD.

Perhaps I should find and start the "Remaster Puppy Live-CD" script in a terminal and look for some useful output.

[brucehohl]

On two different PCs my attempt to remaster Puppy 4.1 stops early in the process when the pup_410.sfs reaches 75162633 bytes. The only modification to my Puppy install was the addition of about 125MB of files in /opt and some symlinks from /usr/lib and /lib to file in /opt. Below is the info reported on the terminal. Can anyone offer any suggestions? Thanks!

Terminal output:
# /usr/sbin/./remasterpup2
/usr/sbin/./remasterpup2: line 57: 15270 Terminated Xdialog --wrap --title "Puppy simple CD remaster" --msgbox "Calculating needed working space.\nPlease wait, this may take awhile..." 0 0
SIZETOTALM=440
rm: cannot remove `/etc/mtab': Stale NFS file handle
ln: accessing `/etc/mtab': Stale NFS file handle
rm: cannot remove `/etc/mtab': Stale NFS file handle
ln: accessing `/etc/mtab': Stale NFS file handle
WKGPART=ramdisk
BURNERDRV=sr0
/usr/sbin/./remasterpup2: line 221: 16875 Terminated Xdialog --wrap --title "Puppy simple CD remaster" --msgbox "Copying files from CD to $WKGMNTPT/puppylivecdbuild/, please wait..." 0 0
Cannot stat exclude dir/file /pup_410.sfs, ignoring: No such file or directory
Parallel mksquashfs: Using 1 processor
Creating little endian 3.1 filesystem on /puppylivecdbuild/pup_410.sfs, block size 131072.
[==================================================== ] 7233/15177 47%

Files created when process stopped:
# ls -l /puppylivecdbuild
total 76348
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1006 2008-11-11 00:59 boot.msg
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1268685 2008-11-11 00:59 initrd.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 12241 2008-11-11 00:59 isolinux.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 112 2008-11-11 00:59 isolinux.cfg
-rwx------ 1 root root 75162633 2008-11-11 01:02 pup_410.sfs
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1627180 2008-11-11 00:59 vmlinuz

[raffy]

Where do you point the puppylivecdbuild? It should be an ext2 (Linux) filesystem. Also, avoid using RAM (any directory other than /mnt uses RAM), as your large build can choke your remaining RAM. Choose a hard disk partition or even flash partition, as long as it is a Linux partition.

[brucehohl]

Raffy, thanks for that reply. I have tried to save to RAM, flash (vfat) and HD (ext3) with the same result. In each case the mksquashfs command stops at file 7262 of 15206. I added the '-info' parameter to the mksquashfs command to get that information. I also excluded the directory which contained file 7262 but than the mksquashfs command stopped at file 7907 of 15095.

Could I be adding too many files (15206) in one pass? Maybe I should exclude /opt and add those files in a separate pass of mksquashfs? Comments or suggestions are welcome.

[brucehohl]

Problem solved:

The problem was caused by a mksquashfs version 3.3 error in handling sparse files. There must have been sparse files among those that I added because mksquashfs version 3.3 succeeded when run with the -no-sparse parameter. To get a clean remaster I downloaded squashfs version 3.4 from sourceforge.net and used devx_410.sfs to make a new mksquashfs binary. Using this binary the remaster succeeded.

[raffy]

Thanks, Bruce. Perhaps you can edit the title of this topic to something like "New remaster binary for 4.1.1"? Also, if the binary is small enough, you can post it here as a gz file.

[brucehohl]

Good idea. Please find attached the binaries for squashfs-tools version 3.4. There were compiled on Puppy 410. The mksquashfs version 3.4 correctly handles sparse files. Under version 3.3 which is included with Puppy 410 the mksquashfs command will hang under certain conditions if sparse file are encountered. A situation meets these conditions if use of the -no-sparse parameter allows completion of the mksquashfs command version 3.3. In this case use mksquashfs version 3.4.

[Subito Piano]

Hi! Encountering a similar problem when remastering 4.3 retro. It just stops after asking me where to save the files or after choosing CD device. I downloaded the zip file (to /root) in hopes it would help, but it didn't. Do i need to put it somewhere else? Is there a bug in 4.3R? If i need to do command line work, that's OK, just be specific, please..

Thanks!

[brucehohl]

It seems unlikely that you have the same problem. Puppy 4.3 appears to have squashfs tools version 4.0. The problem above was corrected in version 3.4.

# mksquashfs -version
mksquashfs version 4.0 (2009/04/05)

[Subito Piano]

Yeah -- i got to thinking, i haven't even tried booting with the fsck or clean or purge options -- that's the place to start. If it continues after that, i'll post. Too much else going on right now, tho...

thanks for the input